After poring through 3 days of immigration analysis this report does the best job of putting the proposals into context.   Things are not what they are espoused to be:

Analysis of Title I “Helping Unaccompanied Minors and Alleviating National Emergency (HUMANE) Act” (aka. the Cuellar / Cornyn bill)

WASHINGTON DC […]  The administration has been steadily increasing its projections of the number who will cross this year and next, as if either preparing the public, or — an unsettling notion — itself for the deluge yet to come. As is well known, the president declared a humanitarian emergency in order to tap resources from multiple agencies. His administration has also requested $3.7 billion in emergency supplemental funding to handle the crisis.
Confronted with the seeming inability of the administration to get a handle on the problem, Congress has convened hearings at which the secretaries of the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS) and other senior officials have testified as to their plans and strategies, none of which appear to have had any significant ameliorative effect on the flow to date.
Many officials, and some members of Congress, have pointed to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as at least partly responsible for the problems in efficiently processing and quickly repatriating aliens, which is generally recognized as a necessary deterrent to others considering the journey by showing them that the United States is serious about its border enforcement.
As observed by Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, in his recent Backgrounder, “2008 Trafficking Law Largely Inapplicable to Current Border Crisis”, the provisions of the TVPRA are in the main, and by their plain language, inapplicable to the phenomenon we are seeing in the Rio Grande Valley.
Nonetheless, the administration has chosen a response to the influx and crafted its emergency supplemental request in ways designed to suggest that the TVPRA is the culprit for tying its officials’ hands and precluding large-scale and prompt removals.
Administration officials have also suggested to Congress that they need new, additional statutory authority to exercise discretion. This is a curious assertion from a White House that in the past has not felt in the least fettered by immigration laws when wanting to exercise unbridled discretion.
It is even more curious because the TVPRA specifically provides that “exceptional circumstances” may be invoked to suspend many of its procedural requirements. If the current border surge does not constitute an “exceptional circumstance”, one wonders why the president declared a humanitarian emergency and why the administration is seeking nearly $4 billion on an emergency basis.
Be that as it may, confronted by daily evidence of an out-of-control border involving thousands of smuggled juvenile aliens, some members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate have heeded the administration’s call and introduced bills they hope will address the crisis. The legislation, named the Helping Unaccompanied Minors and Alleviating National Emergency (HUMANE) Act, is being considered in parallel by both houses. It was offered by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).
An examination of the bill leads us to conclude that it is deeply flawed and, contrary to the legislative sponsors’ intentions, will lead to additional (and quite possibly substantial) flows of families and juveniles arriving at our southern border in the future. Following is a brief analysis of the highlights of each section of Title I of the bill. (Title II is not examined because it relates to general border security measures rather than specifically to processing the surge of arrivals.)  (continue reading analysis)