DeSantis building career on backs of immigrant kids

Republican politicians are seeking any path available to the

2024 presidential nomination. Lately, they’ve decided the most promising one is paved on the backs of vulnerable immigrant children. Among the most brazen to adopt this strategy: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Republicans see immigration and the surge of asylum seekers at the border as potent issues for attacking President Joe Biden -- and for building their own political careers. It doesn’t matter that Biden has kept in place President Donald Trump’s most restrictionist and inhumane border policies. According to Republicans, Biden is still somehow promoting “open borders.”

This baloney has long been red meat for the conservative base. Now, every GOP politician wants a nibble. Governors from such far-flung states as Arkansas, South Dakota and Florida sent National Guard troops and state troopers to the southwestern border this year. The forces were ostensibly deployed to help enforce immigration law, even though they have zero jurisdiction on the matter.

Eventually politicians decided that to prove their true nativist bona fides, they must prove their willingness to be cruel to immigrant children. And so they have.

For months, the DeSantis administration has been jerking around shelters and foster families that care for unaccompanied migrant kids, including by refusing to renew these providers’ licenses. One shelter, run by Lutheran Services of Florida, had to close in November because the state wouldn’t respond to its renewal application. The shelter scrambled to relocate the nearly 60 traumatized children in its care. The shelter sued, and

on the eve of a court hearing, the new license magically materialized. DeSantis then released a confusing new rule that said existing shelters could continue operating for the next 45 days only. After that period, the state will license or re-license care providers only if the Biden

administration agrees to onerous demands, such as giving shelters new obligations usually handled by other federal contractors.

DeSantis appears to be laying the groundwork to kick vulnerable migrant children out of Florida shelters and transitional foster care. This would force more kids into unlicensed emergency intake sites at military bases and convention centers, which even Republicans

have criticized as unsafe and unsuitable for children.

What’s behind this policy change? In comments to Breitbart, state officials offered various bogus rationales. They said they were fighting against “the Biden administration’s massive human-smuggling operation,” referring to the transfer of unaccompanied children from the southwestern border to Florida. Of course,

sending unaccompanied children to licensed care facilities before they’re ultimately placed with permanent sponsors is precisely what federal law requires.

DeSantis offered the stomach-churning suggestion that foreign-born kids are inherently dangerous: “When I was serving in Iraq, we considered, like, a 16- or 17-year-old Iraqi to be a military-age male. And so, they’re effectively

minors in that respect, but you have people that are more, you know, advanced.”

In reality, this decision is really about matching other presidential hopefuls’ performative cruelty to immigrant children.

DeSantis is copying similar measures announced this year by other red states, including South Carolina and Texas. Both of those states ultimately watered down their policies following pushback from the faith community, which is deeply involved in foster care nationwide.

Experts in children’s services say they don’t know how the Florida version of the policy will play out. They’re worried even more copycats will follow. After all, if a presidential candidate can’t move to the border, the border must move to the candidate.