THE BORDER MINEFIELD
As thousands of children surge to the U.S.-Mexico border each week, President Biden must wrestle with a familiar conundrum.
On the one hand, every administration claims that the hard-knuckled immigration enforcement agency that runs the border fiefdom — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — isn’t cut out to run a daycare center. Hence, the overcrowded cells, freezing cement floors, cold baloney, lack of clean water, flimsy sheets of mylar that get used as blankets, etc.
So, the question remains: Why does CBP maintain control over minors in the first place? Once the agency takes custody of a child, it acts in loco parentis
(in place of the parent) and becomes the child’s guardian. If CBP isn’t up to the task, it ought to step back.
This is especially true in those grotesque cases where border guards allegedly snatch children from their parents or guardians.
The government officials were right the first time. CBP doesn’t have the training or skill set to run a daycare. So these children need to be removed from CBP custody as soon as possible. Neither former President Donald Trump, nor former President Barack Obama, did that effectively. Instead, they stuffed kids into cages — or as the media euphemistically calls them during Democratic administrations, “migrant child facilities” or “child detention centers.”
Biden started to make the same mistake during his first few weeks in office, and he got hammered by immigrant advocates who have seen this horror movie before.
Even the dialogue is the same. Conservatives on talk radio — a mostly White cohort that is dependably wrong when discussing refugees and immigrants — can say “crisis” all they want. We all know they’re not nearly as worried about secure borders as they are changing demographics.
Americans can’t declare “a crisis” every time people freak out over the prospect of seeing taco trucks on every corner. Otherwise, as the United States marches toward its destiny of becoming a majority non-White country by 2040, Americans are going to be living in a constant state of crisis.
Besides, a crisis — like power outages in Texas, or wildfires in California — usually comes with an end date. Migration is a recurring phenomenon.
On second thought, maybe those trucks on street corners will be selling papusas.
The thousands of wouldbe refugees who are showing up at the front door unannounced (as refugees tend to do) to ask for asylum may be passing through Mexico, but that doesn’t make them Mexican. If previous waves in 2014 and 2019 are any indication, most of our unannounced guests hail from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently appeared in the White House briefing room to declare that this isn’t a crisis.
“We are challenged at the border,” Mayorkas acknowledged to reporters. “It is a stressful challenge. That is why, quite frankly, we are working as hard as we are, not only in addressing the urgency of the challenge, but also in building the capacity to manage it and to meet our humanitarian aspirations and execution of the president’s vision.”
And, pray tell, just what is President Biden’s vision? No one seems to know. Although Biden doesn’t seem to like it much when — on immigration policy — he is compared to either the last president, or the one before that.
Biden may yet overcome the odds and deliver a decent policy for the U.S.-Mexico border.
So what does Biden think the United States should do when thousands of people show up unannounced, whether they come as refugees fleeing violence or economic migrants looking for a square deal?
That is still the whole point of America, right? It must be. It says so right there in the brochure.
Talk radio host Ben Shapiro likes to tell liberals: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
I like that. Now, here’s my message to conservatives — and other nativists: The beautiful tradition of the United States being a safe haven that offers second chances to the desperate doesn’t care about your fears.
Biden’s vision for the border appears to be coming into focus. According to The Washington Post, the Biden administration is converting its immigrant family detention centers in South Texas into “EllisIsland-style rapid-processing hubs that will screen migrant parents and children with a goal of releasing them into the United States within 72 hours.”
Now we’re talking. Biden may yet overcome the odds and deliver a decent policy for the U.S.-Mexico border. All he has to do is ask himself: “What did Obama and Trump do?” Then do the opposite.