A humane approach to border crisis

If a crisis grows daily, does it cease to be a crisis?

Does it become something worse, something so cruel and inhumane that it shocks the system? Pundits and politicians are calling the situation at the U.s.-mexico border a crisis, but the problem has persisted for weeks, and the word suddenly seems too small, too puny, to convey the gravity of what we are seeing.

This is a stain, a horror, a calamity that no civilized nation should tolerate.

If those words seem overblown, you have not seen the photos or videos of unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the U.s.-mexico border, some of them toddlers with the phone numbers of their parents scrawled on their clothes.

They show children, packed like livestock in detention facilities, weeping for their parents, yearning for a homeland thousands of miles away. The number of children apprehended at the border has exceeded 550 a day for almost a month, and the exodus will likely become “the largest in the last 20 years,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Shelters are at 92 percent of capacity, according to Health and Human Services officials, which could result in physical and psychological damage for the children, health experts say.

The problem has confounded every president in the 21st century, but none faced a problem of this magnitude.

“These photos show what we’ve been long saying, which is that these Border Patrol facilities are not places made for children,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday. “Our focus now is on solutions.”

Solutions are elusive, because comprehensive immigration reform is elusive, but President Joe Biden is taking a humanitarian approach to a humanitarian emergency, tapping Vice President Kamala Harris to spearhead efforts to stem the flow of immigrants into the United States. He refuses to expel the children, searching for other facilities to handle the overflow, including Freeman Coliseum and Joint Base San Antonio. Acquiring these facilities, however, is only a temporary measure. It will do nothing to resolve a mess that has bedeviled politicians for decades. The result is both infuriating and heartbreaking. Republicans call this a “Biden crisis,” but the truth is far more complicated. Former President Donald Trump created a backlog of asylum cases when he enforced his inhumane policy of separating children from their parents in 2019. Immigrants were told their cases would be processed quickly, but it never happened. Immigrants waited months in Mexico, and when a federal judge halted the expulsions, the horrendous backlog emerged. Biden should have foreseen the flood, but he has been in office for only two months, fully engaged with the pandemic. This problem did not emerge overnight. “(The Biden administration) will not expel into the Mexican desert, for example, three orphan children whom I saw over the last two weeks,” Mayorkas told NBC News. “That’s not who we are.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-san Antonio, provided Axios with photos of children at a temporary overflow facility in Donna. The center contains eight “pods” with a total occupancy of 260 people. One pod, according to Cuellar, held more than 400.

“We have to stop kids and families from making the dangerous trek across Mexico to come to the United States,” he said. “We have to work with Mexico and Central America to have them apply for asylum in their countries.”

The effort must transcend the asylum process. It demands an approach akin to the Marshall Plan, the U.s.-sponsored program to help restore the economies of European nations following World War II. For some countries, the aftermath of the war was as brutal as the war itself.

In Mexico and Central America, poverty and gang violence have partnered to create the exodus. The murder rate in El Salvador was just over 50 per 100,000 in 2018, according to refugee organizations. Many families are so desperate they send their children on the long trek by themselves.

Biden will dispatch envoys to Mexico and Guatemala to address the problem, administration officials said. The aim is “to address root causes of migration in the region and build a more hopeful future,” White House spokeswoman Emily Horne said.

That would be the first step in resolving this issue, no matter what we call it.