President’s rhetoric led to horrors at the border

It never should have come to this, to scenes of women and children running from gas fired by U.S. border agents.

And it wouldn’t have happened if President Donald Trump hadn’t done everything he could to create a crisis at the border.

He began concocting the humanitarian nightmare that now exists from the very beginning of his campaign, falsely claiming that the southern border was begin overrun by migrants.

The truth is that the number of border crossers apprehended by border patrol officers in 2017 was the lowest since the early 1970s.

Trump also knows — or should know — that the migrants in the caravan from Central America are fleeing from some of the worst situations on the planet.

As Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said over the weekend, the Trump administration “should have been working with these Central American countries a long time ago” to curb mass flight from violence and poverty.

Instead, Trump makes threats and tries to rewrite the statute for asylum seekers without involving Congress.

The law guarantees the right to seek asylum, and a federal judge said Trump overstepped his powers trying to ignore the law.

Trump also has said that the system has been overwhelmed by those seeking entry, but the American Civil Liberties Union, in fighting Trump’s power grab, pointed out:

In fiscal 2018, Customs and Border Protection processed 1.25 million fewer people arriving at the southern border than in fiscal 2000, despite having a budget and staff that has doubled since then.

Trump also has said that those who enter the U.S. seeking asylum “never show up at the trials. They never come back, they’re never seen again.” Again, not true.

The Department of Justice reported that 89 percent of asylum seekers appeared for their hearings in 2017.

We could have been working on this problem in a constructive way from the moment Trump took office. Working with Central American countries to improve conditions and lessen the need for citizens to flee and increasing the number of asylum officers so that those seeking a determination on their status don’t have to wait for months in what are often dangerous settings.

Instead, we get grandstanding by the president before the midterm elections and now threats to shut down the entire border.

Again, most likely illegal.

And we get images of women and children begin gassed by American border agents.

And worse, as an Associated Press report noted, while children on the Mexican side of the border “screamed and coughed” from the tear gas, “yards away on the U.S. side, shoppers streamed in and out of an outlet mall.”