Biden must clarify tougher border policy
Last Thursday, White House Press Secretary finally used the word “crisis” to describe the influx of migrants, including many unaccompanied children, pouring across the nation’s southern border. But when pressed on the word, which she had long refrained from using, she corrected it to “challenges” and denied that she had meant to imply that the administration’s posture on the situation had changed.
Unfortunately, regardless of what words the Biden team chooses to use to describe it, the humanitarian crisis at the border is indeed just that, a crisis. It is a crisis of Biden’s own making and it is growing worse by the day.
The latest numbers indicate that 4,500 minors are currently being held in Customs and Border Patrol facilities, with another 9,500 in HHS shelters. The number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border was on pace to hit a 20-year high in February and appears to be continuing to grow.
It seems undeniable that the situation is out of control now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have quietly allowed the shelters to drop the 50% capacity restrictions in place to control COVID-19, open new facilities, and even expand into the Dallas Convention Center.
And yet the Biden administration is not only still reluctant to actually call the disaster what it obviously is, a crisis, they continue to encourage more migration with their half-hearted statements about the surge of migrants and the promise not to turn away unaccompanied minors or adopt a stricter border policy.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CBS This Morning on Thursday that while: “I hope they don’t undertake that perilous journey, but if they do, we will not expel that young child. We will care for that young child, and unite that young child with a responsible parent.”
Furthermore, in response to a question about when migrants should plan to come to the United States, Mayorkas promised, “In weeks, in several months, we will expand the legal processes that we already have started to rebuild.”
How can a Central American family, desperate to seek out a better life, interpret that promise as anything but an invitation to begin planning their trip to the US border now?
This mirrors what Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier last week in an interview, when Stephanopoulos pressed him to tell potential migrants not to come, with Biden responding, “Yes, I can say quite clearly, ‘Don’t come,’” before waxing on about the expansion of opportunities that his team was planning to provide to provide for asylum claims. “It’s not going to take a whole long time,” Biden pledged to potential migrants.
Anyone who cares about the conditions for migrant children and families traveling to and at the American border should be concerned about the worsening circumstances. Biden and his administration have been far too reluctant to pressure Central American countries to check the problem, and to loudly and clearly proclaim that the U.S. border is not open. To do anything else while Congress continues to fail to address our broken immigration system does a disservice to the very people Biden officials purport to care about.