In an adaptation of their forthcoming book, “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis write in The New York Times that Trump “suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.” And, in response to a request from the president, aides sought cost estimates to fortify “a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators.”

Sometimes, words are worth a thousand pictures.

Meanwhile, Nick Miroff reports in The Washington Post that acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who has been a steady presence in Oval Office meetings for years, is “[i]ncreasingly isolated within the administration and overshadowed by others.”

Stephen Miller is getting everything he wants from Kevin McAleenan. I’m not sure the president could have a better one-two punch to execute his administration’s immigration plan.

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WATER FOR A MARRIAGE – Amid sweltering desert heat and even hotter political arguments, a California couple are united in their efforts to save the lives of migrants, reports Cindy Carcamo in the Los Angeles Times. Once a month, John and Laura Hunter — the former an enthusiastic Trump supporter and scion of a conservative family, the latter a Mexican immigrant — travel to the desert to maintain over 100 water stations located along the border. “When temps hit 115, people focus on the basics of survival, and petty differences are ignored,” John said. I wonder how John feels about the president’s border suggestions.

EXEMPT OR EXCLUDE? – DHS released a 25-page corrections document for their “public charge” rule, per the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tal Kopan. The document, which notes that “DHS erroneously used the word ‘exempt’ instead of the word ‘exclude,’” fixes an error that would have caused the policy to treat immigrants married to U.S. citizens more harshly than those married to noncitizens. In total, “the agency fixed 65 items in the regulation, correcting 36 distinct errors,” according to ProPublica.

NOT BANKABLE – In response to pressure from grassroots activists in the #FamiliesBelongTogether coalition, major banks are cutting ties with GEO Group and CoreCivic, two of the leading companies behind the private prison and immigrant detention industries, writes Morgan Simon in Forbes. The banks have agreed to not renew $2.4 billion in credit lines and long term loans to both companies, equal to “an estimated shortfall of 87.4% of all future funding to the industry, which depends on these bank credit lines and loans to finance their day to day operations.”

A BROKEN SYSTEM – Confused lawyers, an overwhelmed legal system and a growing humanitarian crisis: The Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies have not only failed to address problems at the border but in some cases has served to worsen them, reports Sophia Lee in World Magazine. Lee offers a “timeline and analysis of several major Trump administration immigration policy decisions,” and notes that by and large these policies “exacerbated the situation at the border by snowballing a humanitarian dilemma into a crisis and chipping away at the legal framework of our asylum system.”

CANADA FOR THE WIN – Fueled by an influx of immigrants, Canada’s population rose by 1.4% since last year — the fastest rate of growth in nearly 30 years, writes Erik Hertzberg in Bloomberg. Of 531,497 people added to the population, 313,580 were immigrants, “providing a steady stream of new workers for Canada’s labor force.”

LIVING UNDOCUMENTED – Today Netflix is releasing Living Undocumented, a docuseries that follows eight immigrant families in the U.S. as they face deportation. Ahead of the release, recording artist, actor and producer Selena Gomez penned an op-ed for TIME magazine discussing her own family’s immigrant experience, and her reasons for getting involved with the series. Immigration is “a human issue, affecting real people, dismantling real lives. How we deal with it speaks to our humanity, our empathy, our compassion. How we treat our fellow human beings defines who we are.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali