By Jim Geraghty
Monday, March 15, 2021
Hey, remember how then-candidate Joe Biden denounced the
“Trump-created
humanitarian crisis at our border”? Good times, good times. It turns out
humanitarian crises at the southern border are a lot easier to create than the
Biden team thought.
There’s a dark humor to watching media institutions such as ABC News trying to
acknowledge that the new administration that is (How Refreshing)™ is now putting record numbers of
migrant children in “facilities similar to jail,” which sounds suspiciously
like the “kids in cages” we previously saw denounced as a “moral stain” on our nation by both the media and Democratic senators.
The number of unaccompanied teens
and children in U.S. custody along the U.S.-Mexico border has reached record
numbers, forcing children to stay longer in perilously overcrowded border
facilities, many of which are similar to jail, multiple sources who reviewed
the most recent government data told ABC News. There are now 4,276 children in custody, up from about 3,400 earlier in the
week. It is a 25 percent increase, which sources tell ABC News is troubling and
could lead to the kind of environment last seen during the 2018-2019 surge, in
which six migrant children died in U.S. custody.
Overcrowding, measured in
pre-pandemic levels, has spiked, various sources who reviewed recent government
data told ABC News. Rio Grande Valley is at 363 percent capacity and all the
major Border patrol sectors are at well over 100 percent capacity.
Children interviewed on Thursday by
lawyers conducting oversight as part of a federal court case reported sleeping
on the floor; being hungry; only showering once in as many as seven days; and
not being able to call family members.
“One of them shared that he could
only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the
window,” Neha Desai, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, told CBS
News, citing interviews with nearly a dozen children, including an
unaccompanied 8-year-old girl.
I’ll remind you that the vice president used to say, “This is a president who has pushed policies that’s been about
putting babies in cages at the border in the name of security when in fact what
it is, is a human-rights abuse being committed by the United States
government.” How would Harris characterize the treatment of children in CBP
facilities now?
Is it any less of a human-rights abuse when she and Biden
do it?
(You’re a well-read readership with a long memory, so you
no doubt recall that one of the factors that spurred the outrage about “kids”
in cages were photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the
Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Ariz., back in 2014, under the
Obama administration.)
If a Democratic presidential candidate spends a lot of
time denouncing a Republican administration’s immigration enforcement as
“draconian policies, grounded in fear and racism” and promises to create a
“roadmap to citizenship” for 11 million people who entered the country illegally
and to undo every restriction on entering the country enacted during the
previous administration, while tacking on a perfunctory pledge to “enforce our
laws without targeting communities, violating due process, or tearing apart
families’. . . what do you think these migrants are going to hear?
But between the lines of the news coverage, you can see a
lot of effort to treat the migrant surge as just some strange and random thing
that happened, completely unconnected to Biden’s rhetoric and policy changes.
That ABC News report notes that, “Traditionally, the
numbers of migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. increases in late
spring.” Is it late spring already? Most Americans haven’t even filled out
their NCAA Tournament brackets yet. What we’re seeing is not traditional or
seasonal. Something changed in the past few months that convinced these
migrants that they were now allowed to cross the border into the United States
without legal consequence.
Of course, Vox and the Migrant Policy Institute are
here to assure us that none of this is Joe Biden’s fault:
“This isn’t a new flow that we’re
just seeing because Biden is coming into office,” Jessica Bolter, a policy
analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said. “The US government still
hasn’t figured out exactly how to manage this flow of families and children.
And throughout the Trump administration, the government neglected to find a way
to adjust US border enforcement mechanisms in a way that protects their rights,
but also exerts control over the system.”
. . . Smugglers have also been
spreading misinformation about the Biden administration’s plans to process
asylum seekers in an effort to profit from it. Pinheiro said she has heard
rumors spreading that migrants staying in certain camps will be processed or
that the borders would open at midnight.
But that’s not to say that
favorable policies from the Biden administration are primarily what’s driving
people to migrate. Pandemic-related economic deterioration and hurricanes
that devastated Central America late last year, as well as
more longstanding issues such as gang violence, government corruption, and crop
failures due to climate change in the region are among the factors pushing
people out of their home countries to make the perilous journey north.
“If people are already struggling
with crop failures or their house has been destroyed by a hurricane or they’re
being extorted, and then they hear that there’s a new administration coming in
that’s going to treat migrants better, that could be kind of the tipping point
where they say, ‘Now is the right time to migrate.’ But it wouldn’t come out of
the blue,” Bolter, of the Migration Policy Institute, said.
First, the last hurricane of the 2020 Atlantic-hurricane season was
Tropical Storm Gamma, which made landfall October 3. You’re telling us
we’re seeing an intense surge of kids coming across the border in
early-to-mid-March because of hurricanes that hit before Trump went to the
hospital with coronavirus?
Second, if pandemic-related economic deterioration is
what’s driving the surge of migrants, why didn’t the surge we’re seeing now
occur much earlier in 2020? (Keep in mind, since the pandemic hit, the International
Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the Development
Bank of Latin America have provided $88.7 billion in loans and other
economic assistance to Central American countries — and that’s separate from
the U.S. assistance provided in two supplemental appropriations bills passed in
2020.)
In fact, the month with the lowest level of Southwest border
apprehensions by the Customs and Border Patrol was April 2020, with 16,182. Sounds
like the pandemic slowed down attempts to cross the border considerably. By
August, it was back up beyond 50,000, and by October, it was beyond 70,000.
Last month it was past 100,000, for the first time since June 2019.
Between Vox and the WHO, do you
feel like you’re constantly being given implausible explanations?
Whether or not Joe Biden wanted to send the message,
“Come up North, the border is open,” he has effectively done so. And the waves
of migrants are likely to continue until he loudly, clearly, and repeatedly
communicates otherwise. Either immigration laws are enforced, or they aren’t.
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