Biden meets border surge with compassion
President Joe Biden’s immigration policies will be different from those of former President Donald Trump in several meaningful — and hopeful — ways.
Biden’s approach to immigration also will mirror Trump’s in some ways, and those have begun to emerge.
Stay with me.
Trump oversaw the building of a costly, ineffective wall along a portion of the southern U.S. border. Biden has halted the project.
The wall was not, as Trump famously promised, paid for by Mexico. Instead, U.S. taxpayers will foot the $15 billion bill. The project mostly involved rebuilding existing barriers rather than erecting a new barrier.
It will stand forever as an emblem of anti-immigrant hysteria and a president’s willingness to exploit it.
Trump’s cruelest policy promised zero tolerance, and it delivered. It separated migrant children, including infants, from their parents while failing to establish a reliable system to reunite families.
The new administration will not separate children from parents. But it is deporting single adults and families, according to news reports.
Biden has said migrants should remain in their home countries and await a better time to migrate.
Under Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. had to stay on the Mexican side of the border while waiting for their cases to be decided. Processing of asylum applications came to a standstill. In the meantime, migrants languished in miserable camps, where they were easy targets for gangs and extortionists.
The Biden administration has allowed them to leave those camps, cross the border and pursue their cases. Some of the migrants will be successful. Others will be unsuccessful and will be deported.
Yet no matter which party controls the White House, immigration policy will remain filled with complexities and political distortions.
So far, the Biden administration has responded with compassion to a spike in unaccompanied minors arriving at the border. It has allowed them to be reunited with parents or sponsors in the United States.
Border security officials have reported a near-doubling in the number of children traveling alone. On Monday, it was 561. In February, the daily average was 332, and that was a 60 percent increase over January.
Illegal crossings in general are on the rise. The Border Patrol detained about 4,700 people this week, up from 3,500 in February.
The surge has triggered a blame game in which Republican politicians rushed to the border to declare a crisis — and blame it on Biden’s supposedly soft stance toward illegal entry. In reality, the increase was partly a matter of the weather.
Migrants move during the spring, when the journey is a little less arduous thanks to milder weather — although it’s still dangerous, even more so this year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute, Central American migrants have been arriving in volume at this time of year since 2014, largely due to violence, poverty and political instability at home.
Roberta Jacobson, the White House coordinator for the southern border and a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said the rising numbers reflect renewed hope among migrants, who see in the new administration a “more humane policy after four years of pent-up demand.”
What hasn’t changed are the dangerous circumstances that prompt migrants to flee.
The Biden administration has brought in the Federal Emergency Management Agency to operate a migrant shelter at the Dallas Convention Center. It’s telling that a humanitarian agency has been assigned the job.
The administration also has reopened a facility for unaccompanied minors in Carrizo Springs, Texas, operated by BCFS, a global agency that does disaster relief.
While immigrant advocates worry about the conditions in which young migrants are held, the Carrizo Springs facility shouldn’t be a focus of concern. It’s secure and offers humane medical attention, meals and services while minors await reunification.
Detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection are altogether different. Children are being held in crowded spaces that lack beds and soap.
The Biden administration has made one bad situation a little better. It cleared the way for relatives to contact the Department of Health and Human Services about their children — without fear that the mere act of reaching out to authorities would cause them to be deported.
Gov. Greg Abbott led a charge against Biden’s immigration policies, heralding a border crisis. He was trying to change the subject from his role in the state’s electrical grid disaster.
Other Republicans followed Abbott’s lead in hopes of diverting attention from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and congressional Democrats’ passage of a popular $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, without a single Republican vote.
What remains are two parties in Congress equally responsible for failing to deliver what the country sorely needs: comprehensive immigration reform that will make a difficult situation manageable and reflect American values.