Biden is to blame for the border crisis
In his desperation to reject all things Trump, Joe Biden has created a humanitarian disaster.
SEAN COLLINS
US CORRESPONDENT
26th March 2021
Spiked
The recent surge of illegal immigrants at the US-Mexico border has reached a crisis point. At the current pace, about two million people from Mexico and Central America will be apprehended this year. That’s roughly equivalent to the population of Houston, the US’s fourth largest city. The numbers are likely to reach levels not seen since two decades ago.
It’s not really the scale of illegal immigration per se that has caused this crisis – it’s that the Biden administration and border-enforcement authorities were completely unprepared. Now they are overwhelmed. The most acute humanitarian problem is the arrival of thousands of unaccompanied children, whose numbers have skyrocketed since
Joe Biden entered the White House in January. Some
17,000 migrant children are being held – the highest ever.
In 2019,
Donald Trump was lambasted by the Democrats and the media for putting ‘kids in cages’. Now photos and reports from the border show kids sleeping on top of one another in cramped, grim cells. The administration euphemistically calls them ‘overflow facilities’, but they are really Biden’s own ‘kids in cages’. And the wait-times for children in these border holding stations often extend past the 72-hour legal limit.
The Biden team has denied that it faces a crisis, preferring to describe the situation as a ‘challenge’. But you do not send the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),
as Biden has done, to help with otherwise smooth operations. The reality is that officials are scrambling to address all-out chaos. The Department of Homeland Security is frantically seeking to set up new temporary accommodations, including converting the
San Diego Convention Center into a shelter, and renting out hotel rooms.
All the while, the Biden administration has sought to prevent journalists from getting too close to seeing what is really going on. All media inquiries must go via Washington, and it has introduced an effective gag order on local border patrol from speaking with the media. So much for transparency.
But this didn’t need to be a crisis. This is a mess that Biden himself has made. Campaigning for president in September 2019, Biden said he would welcome a surge. ‘I would in fact make sure that there is, that we immediately surge to the border, all those people are seeking asylum’, he said in a debate. ‘We’re a nation that says, “If you want to flee and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come”.’ Latin Americans heard him, and many have come, some even sporting Biden t-shirts. ABC reporter
Martha Raddatz asked a migrant from Brazil: ‘So, did you come here because Joe Biden was elected president?’ ‘Basically’, the man replied. ‘The main thing was the violence in my country and the second thing was Joe Biden.’ As Mexico’s president, Andrés Manual Lopéz Obrador,
said, ‘Expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so.’
It’s not just Biden’s rhetoric that has signalled that US borders, post-Trump, were now open again. From day one in the White House, Biden introduced specific policies that have dismantled key features of the Trump immigration regime – but with no replacement.
Trump, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a Covid-related emergency order (Title 42) that called for the expulsion of all migrants from Central America. But the Biden administration exempted unaccompanied children from that order, which led directly to the spike in mothers sending their kids north. Biden’s head of Homeland Security,
Alejandro Mayorkas, justified overturning the Trump policy on the grounds that he would ‘not expel [orphan children] into the Mexican desert’. But that’s not what was happening – under Trump, Central American minors were flown to their home countries, and reunited with parents or social services.
Biden also tore up the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy. Under this agreement, asylum seekers waited in Mexico while their cases were heard by US courts. Now Biden seems to have returned to the Obama-era approach of ‘catch and release’. Some
87 per cent of migrant families that crossed the Mexico-US border in March were allowed into the US, according to Axios. Typically, when migrants are released into the country, they are required to appear before a tribunal at a later date. But that date can be many, many years later, and most applicants fail to turn up. Now, in an unprecedented move, Border Patrol has released
some 2,000 migrants without a court date – an indication of how overwhelmed they are.
Some of the harshest criticisms of the Biden administration are coming from
Democrat congressmen from the border in Texas – a region where Trump made
electoral gains with Hispanic Americans in November 2020. Representative Henry Cuellar, a son of migrant farmworkers, said he tried to warn the White House back in January, but the administration
wouldn’t listen. Cuellar, earlier this week,
released photos of the overcrowded cells with migrant kids, breaking the Biden administration’s blockage of media reporting from the area.
A big problem for Biden is that the incentives for trying to enter the US, as they appear to potential Latin American migrants, are out of whack. On one hand, entering illegally looks relatively attractive. As another Texas-border Democrat, Representative Vicente Gonzalez,
says: ‘When you create a system that incentivises people to come across, and they are released, that immediately sends a message to Central America that if you come across you can stay.’ Six months after applying for asylum, even while waiting for their court case, migrants can seek permission to work.