The conditions at the border are the same or worse. The only thing that’s changed is the administration.
In July 2019, during the last surge of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border, House Democrats held a hearing to explore the crisis and to voice their disapproval.
The hearing, “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border,” was chaired by Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, who declared there was “a dangerous lack of accountability at detention facilities” under then-President Donald Trump’s administration.
Americans were “watching scenes of sick children packed into holding cells, pregnant women sleeping on cold floors, and mothers trying to warm newborn babies with aluminum blankets.”
“There is no excuse,” he said, “for our government being so unprepared and indifferent to refugee flows that have been steadily mounting for months.”
But as tens of thousands of migrants again surge to the border, and Border Patrol facilities are again overwhelmed with unaccompanied minors — this time under Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, and during the global COVID-19 pandemic — Raskin has largely been quiet about the issue. His office has issued no press releases or official statements about the new border crisis. On Twitter he’s expressed no concerns about an administration “unprepared” or “indifferent” to refugees.
In fact, many of the loudest left-wing critics in government and media during former President Donald Trump’s 2019 border crisis have so far kept their mouths shut about Biden’s growing crisis, or have instead tried to shift blame back to Trump.
“This is not something that happened as a result of Joe Biden becoming president,” Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas told CNN on Sunday. “We saw the increases dating back almost a year, and this was during the Trump administration.”
In a June 2019 op-ed in the Miami Herald, then-candidate Biden decried “horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages.” During an NAACP forum that year, then-Senator Kamala Harris accused Trump’s administration of “putting babies in cages” and “human rights abuse.” But as Border Patrol facilities are again bursting at the seams, Biden’s administration has so far refused to classify the situation as a crisis, instead calling it merely a “challenge” or “the situation.”
“This is not kids being kept in cages,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in February, a month when Border Patrol officers apprehended almost 97,000 people at the Southwest border, including 9,297 children. It was the busiest February at the border since 2006, when the vast majority of illegal border crossers were male workers from Mexico.
Now, large numbers of border crossers are families and children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which produce additional challenges for authorities. It takes about eight hours to process illegal migrants from Mexico and return them over the border, but it takes almost ten times as long for families coming from other countries, said Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“It’s much more difficult for Border Patrol to handle children. It’s much more difficult for Border Patrol to handle families. And it’s much more difficult for Border Patrol to handle third-country nationals, that is people who aren’t from Mexico,” Arthur told National Review.
“You can’t turn kids out on the street,” Arthur added. “I can’t release an 8-year-old into the streets of Laredo. I can’t put an 8-year-old on a bus. So the real problem was with the law, that law that encourages people to enter the United States, or to have their kids smuggled to the United States illegally.”
As of Sunday morning, Border Patrol was holding more than 4,200 unaccompanied children in short-term “jail-like” holding facilities, CBS News reported. The vast majority of those kids had been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for longer than the maximum 72 hours, at which point they’re legally required to be transferred to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Inside the cramped Border Patrol centers, children are being forced to sleep on bare floors and sometimes go days without showers. Many have not been allowed to call their parents or other relatives, the Associated Press reported.
Arthur said that what happened in 2019 is “exactly the same thing that we’re seeing right now.”
But in 2019, media outlets were quick to play up the “kids in cages” narrative, and condemn the treatment of migrants at the border. In July of that year, The Atlantic ran an article with the headline “A Crime by Any Name,” comparing Border Patrol detention facilities to Confederate prison camps during the Civil War. ABC News highlighted a doctor who described them as “torture facilities,” and Texas Monthly described one facility as “a Human Dog Pound.”
House Democrats toured the facilities. Congresswoman Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania told The Atlantic that people were being “caged like either animals or very bad criminals,” and said, “Nothing prepares you for the inhumanity of it.”
Dean has largely remained quiet about Biden’s border crisis. She has released no press releases or public statements about it. She hasn’t mentioned it on Twitter, but did find time to tweet that she was “touched” by Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, calling it “a stark reminder to be patient, kind & helpful to those facing their struggles.”
Like many of you, I was touched by Meghan Markle’s interview. I admire her courage to speak candidly about her mental health struggles.
It’s a stark reminder to be patient, kind, & helpful to those facing their struggles.
We all have one.
Please ask for help if you need it ❤️
— Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (@RepDean) March 8, 2021
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon was one of the loudest critics of the Trump administration when migrants were overwhelming the border. In 2019, he introduced the “Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act,” that would have forced the Trump administration to shutter an emergency tent shelter in Tornillo, Texas, and a for-profit shelter in Homestead, Florida.
“Children belong in homes, schools, and playgrounds, not behind barbed wire,” he said in a press release announcing the bill. “Our taxpayer dollars are being used to traumatize children by keeping them in child prison camps instead of in homes and communities. This is evil.”
Not surprisingly, Merkley has been more charitable to Biden.
During an interview on Thursday with CNN, he acknowledged that the border is “approaching a crisis,” but he said the Biden administration has “a completely different vision from the Trump administration,” and is “operating with the right heart.”
“It’s approaching a crisis,” Sen. Jeff Merkley says as the number of unaccompanied migrant children in US Border Patrol facilities reached record highs this week.https://t.co/SmivOCgKvF pic.twitter.com/LBnYm0uLLt
— New Day (@NewDay) March 11, 2021
Merkley largely blamed Trump for the newest rush of migrants, saying “they were stranded for months, some for years, by the Trump administration in Mexico under completely intolerable circumstances. And now that the border is not closed, they’re knocking on our door.”
With the Texas and Florida emergency shelters being reopened by Biden — the same shelters Merkley railed against in 2019 — it’s unclear if he intends to refile his “Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act.” Merkley’s press spokeswoman did not respond to an email from National Review.
Some progressive Democrats have continued to raise concerns about the treatment of migrants.
In a letter Monday to Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice and Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Minnesota congresswoman and “squad” member Ilhan Omar called on the Biden administration to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement from contracting with state, county and local jails as detention facilities. The letter was signed by 23 other Democrats.
And when the Biden administration reopened a Trump-era child migrant detention facility in Texas in February, New York congresswoman and “squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay – no matter the administration or party.” Ocasio-Cortez had previously accused the Trump administration of running “concentration camps on our southern border.”
This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay – no matter the administration or party. https://t.co/AEV7s7QQnB
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 23, 2021
The Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES, the progressive nonprofit behind a 2019 “guerrilla art campaign” that placed mannequins in cages on the sidewalks in various U.S. cities, also continues to question Biden’s commitment to the migrant cause. “The Biden admin is fully aware of their actions,” the group tweeted last week, linking to a Time story about locking up children and families.
“When immigration authorities lock up children and families , they are acting with full knowledge of the long-term trauma they are inflicting.”
The Biden admin is fully aware of their actions.
— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) March 11, 2021
Arthur, the Center for Immigration Studies fellow, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection is overwhelmed by the current rush of migrants to the border, just as it was in 2019.
“The processing centers and the stations that exist were built for single, adult males. They weren’t built for children. They weren’t built for families,” Arthur said.
By law, unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border are supposed to be transferred out of border-detention facilities and into HHS shelters within three days, but the shelters are backlogged. It takes time to find and vet sponsors for newly arrived migrant children.
“If you speed up that process, the likelihood the kids aren’t going to show up for court, the likelihood they’re not going to be put with fit sponsors, and the likelihood that something bad is going to happen to them on this side of the border increases,” Arthur said.
That is resulting in migrant children spending more than 72 hours in Border Patrol-processing stations. It was during the Obama administration that chain-link barriers — the so-called cages — were erected in the facilities as a means of separating and protecting kids from adults who could exploit them.
“The biggest concern, both under Obama and under the Trump administration, was that those children could be abused, sexually assaulted in Border Patrol custody,” Arthur said.
Arthur blamed the current surge of migrants to the border on a combination of factors.
Biden’s pro-immigrant rhetoric and promises to institute more humane border policies have created confusion in some Central American countries and, intentionally or not, encouraged thousands of migrants to again make the dangerous trek to the U.S.
Biden’s executive orders and efforts to dismantle Trump-era immigration deterrents, like the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, also have led to more border-crossing attempts. Soon after taking office, Biden announced he would no longer turn away unaccompanied minors at the border, though adults are still being expelled.
The confusion has been a boon to coyotes, who have taken advantage of it to convince people the U.S. border is open and charge thousands of dollars — sometimes entire life savings — to smuggle them through Mexico. In some cases, migrants are preyed upon by cartels and organized crime operators who extort them, or kidnap them and hold them for ransom.
“All of this gets lost in ‘the kids,’” Arthur said. “It’s all about the kids. The kids, the kids, the kids. If you’re really concerned about the kids, you’re going to discourage anybody from paying a smuggler to bring them to the United States to begin with.”