A tear gas canister explodes. A mother hustles her two diapered daughters away as the chemical plume rises in the sandy gulch that is the Tijuana border between the U.S. Mexico. A photographer captures the panic and outrage ensues.
But blame doesn’t belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for firing the chemical crowd deterrent. Migrants had turned to rioters moments before, pelting agents with glass bottles and rocks. Blame lies instead with the U.S. legal system and with the parents who endangered the lives of their children to better their chances at making it into this country.
The caravan that has snaked its way through Central America to the border is very much a child caravan. Embedded with the procession, BuzzFeed reports that of the 4,166 people who made have it to Tijuana, 794 are children. Through no fault of their own, they have been swept up and forced to march hundreds of miles nonstop for weeks.
Migrants used to be predominantly working age males eager to find jobs and send money home. That changed during the Clinton administration. Congress didn’t amend immigration laws. Instead in 1997 President Clinton set immigration policy through a judicial settlement now known as the Flores agreement. The settlement changed standards for detaining families and children. The unintended result? Suddenly minors weren’t a liability. They became an asset when crossing the border illegally.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman blames the settlement for creating “a massive loophole which allows alien family units to illegally cross the border and enter the United States after a short detention.”
“Aliens know that if they bring any minor with them they will be apprehended by Border Patrol and released into the interior of the United States,” Waldman said in a recent statement. “This well-known loophole acts a magnet for family units and entices smugglers to use children as a way to gain access to the United States by posing as a family unit.”
And as the Washington Post reports, the kids keep coming. Not only are migrants more likely to get across the border with children, those kids bring a discount. While a smuggler has to guide adult migrants through the dangerous dessert in the dead of night, they can deliver a family unit directly to a border crossing without the risk of crossing into the U.S. themselves. Hence the lower cost. In turn, children and children accompanied by their parents are harder to deport once across the border.
It would be wrong to assume that every child is only a bargaining chip in the immigration game. Some migrants are truly fleeing with their families in search of a better life north of the Rio Grande. But they are putting their children in harm’s way all the same. Consider the caravaners who rushed the U.S. from Mexico on Sunday with toddlers in tow. Their parents might not have been the rioting migrants, but women and children became human shields regardless.
“What we saw over and over yesterday was that the group — the caravan, as we call them — would push women and children to the front, and then begin, basically, rocking our agents,” Chief Patrol Agent Rodney Scott said during a CNN interview.
This is reprehensible. Children shouldn’t be used as human riot shields. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The two little girls who were captured in that photograph, the diapered toddlers running from the tear gas, were being taken advantage of by their own mother.
