Migration experts say there is a border crisis — but it’s not the one Trump talks about
President Donald Trump addressed the nation Tuesday night about the “humanitarian and national security crisis” on the U.S.-Mexico border.
There is indeed an immigration crisis at the southern border, say immigration experts from across the political spectrum — but it’s not the crisis Mr. Trump is talking about.
The “real” crisis, experts say, is the makeup of migrants now coming in — they’re far likelier than ever to be children and families — and they’re encountering an immigration infrastructure that was not built to care for them. That much has been underscored by the deaths of two recently arrived migrant children in federal custody last month: 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin and 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo. And a wall is unlikely to solve any of those problems.
Mr. Trump made a case Tuesday night for $5.7 billion to begin construction of a border wall, over which the U.S. government has been shut down for several weeks. Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Mr. Trump argued that the wall was needed to resolve a security and humanitarian “crisis,” blaming illegal immigration for what he said was a scourge of drugs and violence in the U.S. and asking: “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”
The president said on Jan. 4 the shutdown could last “months or years” and is considering declaring a national emergency to get the funding.
“To call it a national security crisis or an emergency — there is no basis in that at all,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who was director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under former President Barack Obama. “Now, it’s Central Americans, frequently coming in with their children. And they are not seeking to evade our authorities. They are seeking our authorities to turn themselves in and ask for asylum and for our help.”
Overall border crossings have declined to their lowest level in decades. About 400,000 migrants were apprehended by Border Patrol in fiscal year 2018, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, down from 1.6 million in 2000. Though Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and other administration officials said recently that CBP has stopped 4,000 known or suspected terrorists from crossing the border in fiscal year 2018, documents obtained by NBC News showed the actual number is far lower: just six for the first half of that period.
And a growing portion of migrants being apprehended are indeed families with children, or kids traveling alone. In November, more than 25,000 families turned themselves in, a historic high. They now comprise more than half of all apprehensions.
They tend to be fleeing violence, poverty and political corruption in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Under U.S. immigration laws, people have the right to apply for asylum even if they have entered the country illegally.
And under a 1995 agreement known as the Flores settlement, the U.S. government may not detain children (and, by extension, adult family members who arrived with them) longer than 20 days. They are then released until they get a court date before an immigration judge, a practice Mr. Trump often calls “catch and release.” His administration also calls Flores a “loophole,” though it’s a protection for asylum-seekers who fear being sent home.
Regardless of a wall, all of that would continue to happen so long as Central Americans keep entering the U.S., legally or illegally. Yet all the Trump administration’s recent efforts around asylumseekers — including its “zero tolerance” family separation policy, its just-announced “remain in Mexico” policy, and an attempt to temporarily ban unauthorized border-crossers from applying for asylum — are aimed at deterring migration rather than processing asylum-seekers and protecting their rights.
“The problem with the wall is that it’s geared toward migrant flows in the past, which are the adults who primarily came from Mexico seeking work, and those numbers are way down,” said Randy Capps, director of research for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “So, it’s kind of like they’re fighting the last war.”
A case backlog for asylum seekers in the hundreds of thousands means it’s often years before they’re resolved.
The debate over the wall, Mr. Capps said, is “diverting resources from these other priorities, which I believe are more important.”
That might include hiring more asylum case adjudicators or increasing CBP agents at ports of entry, where more people are now arriving to claim asylum.
Further, a wall would do nothing to end the root cause of the United States’ asylum crisis, which begins long before people arrive at the border.
“The true crisis is that people are leaving miserable lives in Central America, and they’re not going to stop coming unless there is better governance there,” said Mark Feierstein, who was senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “The U.S. has capacity to take these people in and to process their claims, and our border is already generally well-protected through a combination of walls and fencing and patrols.”