Stop illegal crossings but don’t punish children

Any thoughtful American who is satisfied to make a judgment on the Trump administration based only on a snapshot of the situation along the Southern border is either a facile opportunist or a rabid tribalist whose confirmation bias has been fortified by the chum in the water.

We cannot tell the story of little children separated from their parents without first laying out the facts.

Crossing the border illegally is a crime. It is right that the laws be enforced — that is a primary responsibility of the federal government, and it has been sanctioned by the people through their elected representatives.

When enforcement is diminished, traffickers and coyotes exploit the situation. In fact, they exploit every opportunity that avails itself and have found success using the channels of asylum.

There are 48 ports of entry along the Southern border for asylum seekers to utilize. That is the legal and proper way to enter the United States.

Activists and politicians should not be encouraging illegal border crossings. It is immoral and irresponsible and has resulted in horrific treatment and sometimes death of men, women and children by coyotes and other traffickers.

Another fact is that we are ill-equipped to handle the huge influx of displaced minors while their parents remain in the custody of the Border Patrol. Several court rulings and something called the Flores agreement prevent the government from housing adults and children together.

So it is that we have children separated from their parents.

With the zero-tolerance enforcement beginning in April of this year, it has quickly become obvious that Health and Human Services is not adequately constituted to handle the housing of those children.

This should be remedied at once. However the bureaucratic, legal and political factors that got us here, it is outright cruel that children and their parents be separated, barring extenuating legal circumstances. Regardless, we cannot have children housed like inmates while we figure it out.

It is not the Holocaust or Japanese internment, as some have stated, but it is not acceptable in this civilized society and we cannot claim to hold any moral high ground while such systematic cruelty is visited upon children.

Likewise, we cannot return to a “catch and release” practice along the border.

Congress must act now to pass legislation that would allow us to detain families together during legal proceedings.

We can and must secure our borders without children as collateral damage, but we must be informed on the specifics of the challenge as well as the enormity of the problem.

Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, laid the situation out on Monday, saying, “In the last three months we’ve seen illegal immigration on our Southern border exceed 50,000 people each month, multiples over each month last year. Since this time last year, there has been a 325 percent increase in unaccompanied alien children and a 435 percent increase in family units entering the country illegally.”

Nielsen drew a daunting picture of the logistical challenge. “Over the last 10 years, there has been a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims, resulting in asylum backlog of 600,000 cases. Since 2013, the United States has admitted more than half a million illegal immigrant minors and family units from Central America, most of whom today are at large in the United States.”

It is a big problem. Platitudes like “Trump could make a single phone call” to help the kids, are disingenuous.

Similarly, any attempt to use children as pawns on either side of the issue is repugnant.

Time to fix it.