President Biden may not want to credit former President Donald Trump with much, but if there’s one domestic gift his predecessor left him, it was the successful strengthening of our southern border security.
Trump’s supporters had hoped that recent surges in border crossings would be stopped with the building of a wall. In fact, Trump’s more effective tool was diplomacy. By negotiating safe-third-country agreements and getting Mexico to crack down on caravans, Trump reduced the number of border encounters reported by Border Patrol — they plummeted to their lowest point since the beginning of Trump’s presidency in mid-2020. Reported encounters from May 2019 to April of the following year fell by 88%.
Now, two months into his presidency, Biden has undone all of that, manufacturing a crisis of migrants flooding our southern border. And yes, that means he is locking children up in cages that approach full capacity.
According to internal documents from the Department of Health and Human Services obtained by Axios, Border Patrol put an average of 321 children per day in HHS custody by the beginning of March. Those would be the “cages” once maligned by the media, in contrast to just 47 per day on average during the first week in January. HHS also reported child migrant facilities at 94% capacity “and expected to reach its maximum this month.”
So, amid a global pandemic, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that we’re set to see a deluge of migrants the size of which we haven’t experienced in “over 20 years.” And, whereas a negative COVID-19 test is required for entry to the U.S. via air travel, Border Patrol has been releasing migrants into the country without any tests at all.
In January, Border Patrol reported more than twice as many border encounters as they had in January of 2020. This is a humanitarian crisis compounded by a pandemic. It is going to get drastically worse, and Biden is responsible for that.
Thanks to Trump’s safe-third-country agreements and negotiations with Mexico, he drastically ameliorated the “kids in cages” crisis. Instead of lockups in the U.S., families could remain together in civil society in Mexico while their asylum claims were processed.
But by giving migrants a clear path to our border and revoking the Remain in Mexico policy, Biden must either keep adult migrants in Border Patrol facilities or revert to catch and release. Biden is currently doing a mix of both.
If he had kept Trump’s diplomatic deterrents from inviting this surge, Biden wouldn’t have to make this decision at all. But as long as the courts continue to refuse family reunification because it incarcerates minors, his dilemma will persist. But Biden asked for this, and now, hundreds of thousands of migrants and Americans along the southern border will suffer as a result.
