“It was, by now, a familiar feedback loop: the President, reacting to a Fox News broadcast, launches a tweet storm that then drives a news cycle.” The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer tracks how we got from a news story about a relatively small caravan of immigrants to actual plans to deploy National Guard troops along the US-Mexico border. (People in Puerto Rico should form a caravan. Maybe Trump will send the National Guard there.)

+ Do we really need to call in the guard now, when numbers show border arrests are down? “US Border Patrol data shows that overall apprehensions began to fall steadily after 2006, falling more steeply with the onset of the so-called Great Recession in December 2007. Apprehensions fell from nearly 1.8 million in 2005 to under 304,000 in 2017, the lowest number in 37 years.”