It really depends on the composition of the Board and the charges involved. One of my classmates got arrested for peacefully (and on camera) demonstrating at the Republican Convention and was charged (and convicted) of Disorderly Conduct which was a misdemeanor. No problem. A person I ended up not hiring was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct "celebrating" the Lakers victory, and the CA Board suspended that person for 180 days. Big problem. If you are going to a political demonstration, free expression, disorderly conduct, and rioting are on a continuum that you could well be in the moral right and in the legal wrong. It's up to you to weigh whether your cause is that just and whether losing means winning.
As a native Arizonan, border control has always been an ugly process which only lately is getting the attention it deserves. All of what you see has been done for over 20 years (yes, the child detentions too ever since the Reagan Administration). The only thing Trump's doing differently is being such a bombast about the issue that it's now in the public eye. There's no good solution though, because we want it all. You can't have open borders in this case. Social services at the border (that includes California) are severely overtaxed, and part of the hospital overpayments in those areas subsidize care. But, we demand their cheap labor (if you eat in restaurants, buy any sort of produce, shop in any store that uses contract janitorial services, you're part of that economy) and we're not willing to enforce against the businesses for immigration fraud.. Yet, we also want to demonstrate both our humanity and our dedication to democratic values. There's no easy solution, and all of them suck.
As far as how we treat the children, it's actually better than the countries they are coming from. Think about that the next time you see them. It's not like they want to end up in detention, but to be desperate enough to tolerate those circumstances really drives home how crapsack a world they are trying to escape from.
I personally draw the line at coyotes, I wish that due process did not apply and that we could summarily execute them as an enemy of the state (I have some personal and professional encounters with their victims which drive my attitude). Same for the cartels runs across the border daily as well. As for the political and economic refugees, we can absorb only so many at a time, we cannot have completely open borders without significantly restructuring our economy and taxation rules. That said, who of us is not a beneficiary of immigration at some point in time if you are US? To ignore the plight as if it couldn't happen to you is to deny your ancestral circumstances landing to this country (even if you're "Native" American due to the BIA policies). How we choose to deal with it is questionable, because our ancestors' circumstances are not ours.
But, I find it completely hilarious that all the crap I used to get in Sweden and Denmark for how crap we treat our immigrants, they themselves are completely overwhelmed with a bunch of immigrants that have become enclaves rather than integrate into their country. The Turkish problem in Germany among those who have been generations within the country, the French and the North Africans, those are much more intractable problems than our immigration from New World countries. We Americans have much more in common and bridge integration much more effectively with the New World immigrants than Europa can with their nationalist cultures with any other culture. To be American is to share a set of values, but to be European, you have to be a people. That's certainly working more in our favor. I make it a point to rub it in whenever I'm in Stockholm or Berlin what a mess they got themselves into with their idea of multiculturalism. I vastly prefer our version.
