Parties provide differing views of migrant wave
GOP senators, House Dems visit facilities
WASHINGTON — A sizable chunk of Congress was in Texas on Friday for a political split screen at the border as Republicans sought to keep the heat on President Joe Biden over what they call a “crisis” with thousands of migrants crossing into the U.S.
Nineteen Senate Republicans, including Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas, toured the Rio Grande Valley and visited Border Patrol facilities, including in Donna, where they tweeted out pictures that showed cramped conditions and kids sleeping on stone floors. They said their boat tour of the river was stopped short when they encountered a dead body floating in the water.
Meanwhile, Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio led a group of six other House Democrats to Carrizo Springs, site of a shelter for migrant children where the Biden administration this week allowed a TV crew to film kids playing soccer and grouped under a gazebo.
The Biden administration says the Carrizo Springs shelter is more representative of the conditions migrant children will be living in once they’re processed through Border Patrol centers like the one in Donna. But Republicans say the administration isn’t acting fast enough to move children out of those crowded facilities like the one they’re spotlighting, and they say the president’s policies are making the situation worse.
“These are the pictures the Biden administration doesn’t want the American people to see,” Cruz wrote in a tweet with four images showing small children sleeping on mats on the ground and with their hands pressed against windows in doors they were being kept behind. Other pictures showed dozens of individuals packed into holding rooms, lying on the ground under silver foil blankets.
“This is the CBP facility in Donna, Texas,” Cruz said, referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “This is a humanitarian and a public health crisis.”
In Carrizo Springs, Castro and the Democrats who joined him for Friday’s tour agreed the situa
tion is a humanitarian crisis — but they say it’s the same one that has been at the border for years as migrants have sought refuge in the U.S.
Even if the facility they visited is in better shape than the one in Donna, the Democrats say the administration still needs to do everything it can to get children through it and with family or sponsors in the U.S. as fast as possible. They said they were there working on recommendations to take back to the White House.
“I think all of us would agree the pictures we’ve seen at the CBP facilities — as they’ve often been now and in the past — are horrendous, and that nobody should be kept in those conditions,” Castro said. “Even these facilities that have better conditions than the CBP processing centers are not the places for kids.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who was herself a refugee, said children she talked to at the center didn’t even know who the president is.
“The majority of the people are not political animals like we are. They’re looking for an opportunity to survive and thrive,” Omar said. “I know there’s a lot of conversations we get to have about the politics and logistics of all of this, but at the end of the day, at the center, part of this conversation are children — children who are fleeing unconscionable situations who desperately need for us to meet them with dignity and humanity and to make sure we are living up to what international law dictates and what our laws dictate.”
Standing with them was Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat and senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who said she expects the House to find funding to improve the process.
At their own news conference later Friday, Senate Republicans slammed the Biden administration for denying press access at the border intake sites they visited, accusing the president of trying to hide the worst of the situation.
“This is sad. This is depressing. This didn’t have to happen,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said. “This is a self-inflicted wound on our nation, and I just don’t believe the Biden administration is up to the task of fixing it.”
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the 18 hours the senators spent in Texas “tragically moving.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called it “the most informative trip I’ve ever taken — and that’s saying a lot.”
“The No. 1 thing I’ve taken out of this trip … is the president of the United states and the vice president of the United States need to do what we just did,” Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska said. “They need to come down here, they need to listen and they need to learn.”
Single adults the majority
The senators said they heard from Border Patrol officials who have pleaded with the administration to leave in place Trump-era policies such as a requirement that asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for their hearings in the U.S. During the Trump administration, some 29,000 people were in that queue amid an asylum backlog that reached 500,000 cases. Biden ended the policy when he took office.
Immigration experts have pushed back on the characterization that the crisis is new, saying the current influx of migrants is part of an ebb and flow that has been occurring for years now.
The trip comes as the Biden White House got more aggressive this week in pushing back on the
GOP narrative that the administration had created a crisis.
The president Thursday directly accused his predecessor of undermining efforts his transition team made to get a handle on the situation, including stalling requests to start standing up housing facilities for children until days before Donald Trump left office.
Those sites are quickly coming online, the administration says, with at least eight to soon start housing children in Texas, including at Joint Base San Antonio-lackland and Freeman Coliseum. Work is also underway to quickly staff up the Office of Refugee Resettlement — tasked with finding sponsors to care for children in the U.S. — where the Trump administration had instituted a hiring freeze.
The White House said there were more than 4,900 children still in Border Patrol custody this week but that it is “making progress” on more quickly transferring them to sites run by the Health and Human Services Department. Officials said 465 children were transferred Tuesday, up from an average of 302 for the 30 days before that.
While the number of children and families crossing the border and seeking asylum is increasing, the vast majority — about 71 percent — of the 100,441 encounters the Border Patrol reported in February were with single adults, many of whom have tried to cross more than once.
The Washington Post reported that the recidivism rate along the U.s.-mexico border had jumped to 38 percent in January since last March, when the Trump administration instituted a public health order allowing agents to immediately expel border crossers because of the coronavirus pandemic. That was up from 7 percent in 2019, according to CBP data, as agents saw crossers return again and again after being quickly turned back to Mexico, the Post reported.