When you hear Democrats’ fake indignation over migrant detention facilities, just know that they’re in the process of walking away from a problem they could fix but have no interest in taking responsibility for.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings put on a show Thursday screaming at acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan about the way illegal immigrant children are treated in detention centers.
“These are human beings!” raved the Maryland Democrat. “Human beings just trying to live a better life!”
No one disputes this, but what does that have to do with stopping parents and smugglers from dragging children and babies 2,000-plus miles from Central America in the scorching heat and dumping them into the care of U.S. Border Patrol?
Cummings went on at the hearing, “What I’m saying is I want to concentrate on these children and I want to make sure that they are okay. I said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s not the deed that you do to a child. It’s the memory.”
The “memory” any of these children in U.S. custody have will not be the fault of anyone here. No one asked for hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans to leave their homes or send their children to Texas with human traffickers, hoping that we’ll bear the burden.
The Trump administration, including the departments of homeland security, defense, and health and human services, has been very up front about the chaos brought on by the overwhelming flow of migrants overrunning the border and burning through our resources. McAleenan and the heads of each of the other agencies weren’t telling a joke when they said each day this year that the whole system was ready to collapse in the absence of funding and changes to the immigration laws.
As McAleenan said at Thursday’s hearing, the system and its facilities were designed decades ago for the purpose of accommodating adult males from Mexico, who would be processed and deported back home in a matter of hours. It was not set up to care for a sudden influx of what will soon be 1 million family units, most of them being children.
Congress recently passed nearly $5 billion in additional funding to go toward managing the flow. That money will disappear in a matter of months, and Congress will almost certainly have done nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigrants crossing the border.
Cummings can scream all he wants about the border facilities. But he knows that this is the fault of him and every Democrat who is refusing to change the immigration laws that usher everyone south of Texas across the border, where free care awaits them.
