When President Donald Trump authorized the military to use “lethal force” — if necessary — against migrants at the southern border last week, it was in his purview as the commander in chief. But it created a legal gray area.

Tensions have escalated on the southern border since, as US law enforcement officials fired tear gas at the asylum seekers, including children, after violence broke out during a march near the San Ysidro Port of Entry over the weekend.

Thousands of families fleeing persecution in Honduras are walking to the United States to request asylum. President Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he doesn’t like that.

Aside from deploying the military to the border, Trump said on Thursday that he plans to detain asylum seekers in “massive tents” along the border. I won’t go into the details about the legal problems this would cause the Trump administration, or how inhumane tent cities are. Vox’s Dara Lind does a good job explaining that here.

The Trump administration has a new official policy to deal with families seeking asylum at the border. They won’t separate children from their parents, but they will keep those families locked up together until their cases are processed — even though it’s against the law to detain immigrant children indefinitely.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), which announced the new policy Friday night, has come up with a weak legal argument to justify it. (Vox’s Dara Lind explains the policy here.) DOJ lawyers said keeping families in detention centers is the only way to comply with US District Judge Dana Sabraw’s recent injunction that banned immigration authorities from separating families and ordered them to reunite those they had already split up.

The growing cries for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to be abolished, reformed, or restructured now includes a group of 19 ICE agents.

The investigators, who work for ICE Homeland Security Investigations, sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen last week, asking her to split their division from the agency’s immigration enforcement arm, which has been the target of public backlash over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Republicans, including Donald Trump, are proposing to solve the crisis caused by the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the US/Mexico border by trying to allow families to be detained together in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security.

That would prevent the trauma and outrage that separating families has caused. But it wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem of adequate care for children in government custody — and it could make it extremely difficult to honor due process for migrants seeking asylum.

This time last year, tens of thousands of unaccompanied children — and nearly as many families, mostly mothers with children — from Central America were en route to the US through Mexico. The US (with a big assist from Mexican authorities) managed to tamp down the flow of children and families by August 2014. But the government refused to declare that the crisis was over. The reason: the real test, they think, is whether as many children and families will come from Central America during the next peak season for migration — in spring and early summer of this year.

So are we headed for another border crisis? The early numbers indicate that children and families will still be coming to the US — but not in quite the volume they came last year. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the US will apprehend 39,000 unaccompanied children coming from Central America this fiscal year (from October 2014 to September 2015) and an additional 35,000 families. The real question is whether that’s enough to constitute a crisis.

The Hondurans interviewed in the report fled Honduras because their lives had explicitly been threatened — mostly by gangs. One man had been shot in the back repeatedly by a gang initiate, and had to spend two months in the hospital and relearn how to walk. Even though he’d initially been targeted at random — the initiate was told to kill the next person he saw — he found out after he recovered that the initiate was now obligated to track him down and finish the job. Another man had sent his wife and son to the US after gang members tried to kidnap his son, then left on his own once he heard they were safe. And at least two of the 25 deportees had fled the country after they watched their mothers killed by gang members — knowing that witnesses of gang murders aren’t allowed to live.

Now that they’ve been returned to Honduras, their only priority is to make sure the gang members looking for them don’t know they’re back in the country. And because gangs are so powerful, and the government provides no protection, that means making sure no one knows they’re back in the country. Deported Hondurans hiding from gang violence can’t work, stay in their homes, or even see their children.

Many child migrants are getting released to relatives in states that aren’t used to immigrant children. Here’s how one community’s coping

Yesterday, I laid out some basic facts about asylum, for the purpose of explaining that “children should just apply for asylum in their home countries” isn’t a suggestion that makes sense. But I wanted to say a little more about why the discussion matters. It actually reflects two different understandings about what the humanitarian crisis really is.

Everyone agrees that the journey Central American children and families are taking through Mexico to the US is dangerous and horrifying. That’s why stories about mothers giving their girls birth control before they leave, in case they get raped on the journey, are being used by both sides: those who think children and families should be allowed to stay, and those who want to send them back to send a message to others.

Many policymakers, including Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), have made a suggestion that sounds like an easy solution to the child migrant crisis: children shouldn’t be coming to the US to seek asylum, because they should be applying for asylum in their home countries.

That’s close to something the US might be planning to do. Rumors circulated last week that the White House was going to start a program in Honduras to take in refugee applications. But it totally misses the point of asylum, which is that people apply for protection when they’ve already left for another country.

Both chambers of Congress are trying to pass a bill to address the child and family migrant crisis. But those bills look very different. And they don’t have much time to work out a deal.

The Obama administration is running out of funds to handle the influx of children and families coming into the US. Between handling the children and families who have already entered the US and those who are projected to come, Border Patrol is on track to run out of money in September; Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is in charge of detaining immigrants, will run out of money in August.

The flow of unaccompanied immigrant children across the US-Mexico border — mostly from Central America — is continuing to gain attention as a humanitarian crisis.

So here are 14 things you need to know to get a handle on what is actually going on along the border right now; what process the US has in place to deal with unaccompanied kids and families; and what the government wants to do now.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina on Thursday told the Washington Post that his country could legalize marijuana, which would make Guatemala the second in the world — after Uruguay — to do so.

“It’s clear how marijuana doesn’t cause the same level of addiction or damage to health [as cocaine and heroin], and these are steps we’re taking in the right path,” Molina said.

The child migrant crisis has some roots in a seemingly unrelated policy: the war on drugs.

Since October, 52,000 children from outside the country have come to the US without an adult and strained the US immigration system. Many of them are fleeing a rising tide of violence back home in Central America’s Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

The official government term for people under 18 apprehended crossing the border without a parent is unaccompanied alien children, but that’s slightly misleading: most of them are teenagers. (This has helped feed border hawks’ frustration over the way the issue is being addressed, as some feel teenagers from Central America could be gang members themselves.)

But new government data, analyzed by the Pew Research Center, shows something striking: the increase in unaccompanied minors over the last year is driven largely by children under the age of 13.

As the migration of unaccompanied children, many from Central America, across the US-Mexico border continues, it’s worth asking what can be done to address issues in the children’s countries of origin that are causing them to come in the first place.

We reached out to Cynthia Arnson, the director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, to find out. She researches citizen security and crime, conflict resolution, and other issues in Latin American countries. She coauthored a recent report on violence in Mexico and Central America, and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations committee on the topic on July 17. Here’s what she told us about the state of the migration crisis, Central America’s violence problem, and whether the US can do much to help solve it.

One of the chief concerns Republicans have raised about the current system for dealing with child migrants is that children aren’t held in government detention while waiting for their immigration court hearings. The concern is that kids can simply abscond into the US and live as unauthorized immigrants, rather than showing up to court. But how many children who are sent to immigration court really do abscond, and actually show up to their hearings?

We now have a much more accurate answer to that question. Earlier this week, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data analysis hub run out of Syracuse University, released data on children in immigration court over the last decade. Not all of these are children who entered the US unaccompanied, but most of them probably are. The overwhelming majority of children who entered immigration court in 2013 and 2014 were from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries driving the child and family migrant crisis. Among the ways TRAC offers to break their data down: whether or not a child was “in absentia” when the court case was decided.

As the child and family migrant crisis has continued to be in the news over the last few weeks, more Americans are beginning to believe that it’s a serious problem. That means they want something done, quickly. And deporting all the children and families who have come to the US is the most obvious option for quick and decisive action.

That’s the takeaway from a new poll that YouGov and the Huffington Post put out today. That poll gave respondents the choice between deporting children to their home countries as soon as possible and keeping them in the US “until it’s certain they have a safe place to return.” (That doesn’t reflect any policy currently being proposed, but whatever.) Nearly half of Americans — 47 percent — said it was more important to deport children as quickly as possible. 38 percent preferred to keep them.

Congress and the Obama administration are scrambling to respond to the humanitarian crisis of 57,000 unaccompanied Central American children who’ve crossed the border into the US this year.

But a secret UN report obtained by Vox paints a very disturbing picture: the current process is totally failing to protect Mexican children from harm. Children who have reason to fear for their lives, or who are victims of human trafficking, are almost certainly being sent back into danger.

The immigrants were deported from New Mexico, which means they were probably being held in the Artesia facility. (About 400 immigrants are currently being held at Artesia, though the government wants to increase capacity to 700.)

On June 26th, an ICE officer told the press that the goal of opening the Artesia facility was to deport families in ten to fifteen days. That was eighteen days ago — including the long July 4th weekend. So it looks like they’re already up to pace.

As I’ve been writing about the crisis of children and families fleeing Central America for the US over the last several weeks, I’ve received a number of emails from people asking how they can help. With help from other reporters, advocates, and experts, I’ve compiled a list with some options — from donating money or supplies, to volunteering, to fostering a child.

Most of these organizations are based in South Texas — the place where most children and families are entering the country, and where many of them are being held temporarily in short-term facilities. But as children and families get moved through the system, they’re being dispersed throughout the country: in long-term government-provided housing for unaccompanied children, in detention centers for families, and in homes with relatives. So no matter where you live, if you’re interested in lending a hand, you can probably find an opportunity.

As Congress considers how to address the child and family migrant crisis, many members of both parties have called for a change to a 2008 law — to take the quick and restrictive process that’s currently used for unaccompanied children coming from Mexico, and use it for children from Central America as well. Many members of Congress in both parties have expressed support for the idea, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) are expected to introduce a bill to make the change soon. The Obama administration has also indicated support for this idea.

Here’s what that would mean:

Tens of thousands of children from Central America are arriving alone at our border, posing a major challenge to humanitarian systems that have been in place since World War II. Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind explains in two minutes.

A new International Migration Review study shows that deported immigrants’ desire to reunite with family can often trump the threat of enforcement and lead them to return to the US. That has pretty clear implications for enforcement policy toward unauthorized immigrants who are settled in the United States — especially parents of children who are US citizens.

But does the study have any implications for the children and families who’ve been arriving in the United States from Central America in recent months?