Biden’s first big mistake: Crisis, yes crisis, on the border
Raise your hand if you’re surprised by the latest crisis at our southern border. Only a naif would invite everyone to a party and then be shocked when they show up at the door.
President Joe Biden is hardly naive, but his legendary empathy may be his downfall. Despite what is so obviously a crisis, the Biden administration refuses to use the word. To make matters worse for himself, Biden is refusing media access to the Border Patrol compounds that are housing thousands of children and teens for too long, and under dubious conditions. He has allowed some reporters into some shelters — just not the overcrowded ones. You can’t make this up.
It would seem that a president who presumes to make solving long-running border problems a crux of his campaign might have wanted to think things through more carefully before opening the floodgates to unaccompanied minors.
Make no mistake: President Donald Trump’s border policies, especially separating children from their parents, were terrible by anyone’s standards. That unfathomable policy, erroneously created to discourage mass immigration, is morally indefensible. But what Biden has done — and with far less transparency than Trump — is awful, too, if not exclusively his fault. The parents who sent their children on such a dangerous journey also bear responsibility, even if Biden’s inducements essentially gave them tacit permission.
But here at home, the buck stops with Biden. He deserves at least as much scrutiny as Trump got.
At least Trump can validly claim that he allowed reporters to visit his border encampments on organized tours. But media access is complicated when children are involved because of privacy concerns. The little we do know about the current deluge of unaccompanied children is thanks to photos released to Axios by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Tex., who reported overcrowding and “terrible conditions.” The photos show plasticsheeted pods with a holding capacity of 260 each. But Cuellar said that one pod he saw during a recent visit contained 400 teenage males.
The flow of these unaccompanied children seems nowhere near ending. No sooner do some find homes, either in Health and Human Services facilities or with family members willing to take them in — 40% have a parent or legal guardian in the United States — than new arrivals fill their spots. The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas is near capacity. The League of United Latin American Citizens has requested temporary legal status for the teens and has pleaded for media access to help humanize the detainees to the American public by telling their stories.
Meanwhile, Biden & Co. need to come clean. Contrary to the narrative of their defense, sending unaccompanied children back home does not mean turning them out into the desert to starve. When asked during Thursday’s news conference whether he might have rushed his open-door policy, the obvious answer to which is “yes,” Biden instead blamed Trump for making the process of receiving “migrants” difficult and said he makes no apology for reversing what Trump did.
“If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re not just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side,” he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeated this preposterous dodge: “We are not expelling children, girls, 5, 7, 9 years old back into the desert of Mexico, back into the hands of traffickers.”
For the record, not even Trump did that. When he returned children to their families in Mexico and elsewhere, he typically had them flown home, where they were greeted by local officials and taken to their parents.
It never takes long for a new president to fall into the familiar pattern of evading the press and trying to deflect attention from mistakes. But Biden was supposed to be a different kind of president — a transparent leader, an open book and, yes, empathetic to a fault. On all counts but the last, he is failing right now, reminding us of what they say about marriage: The thing you loved most about your mate in the beginning is the thing you’ll end up hating the most.
Biden’s empathy shouldn’t be his — or our — undoing. There’s no dishonor in admitting a mistake. Americans have big hearts and are suckers for apologies. Though his intentions were good, Biden created a predictable crisis that he had been warned against. No one wants to bring more suffering to these children, but neither can we care for all those born to misfortune. Say that, Mr. President.
And let us see what there is to see.