Border officials have taken into custody more than 14,000 unaccompanied children in the first three weeks of March. Leaked photos of one of the temporary housing facilities where these children are being held show thousands lined up on mattress pads along the concrete floors, huddled in aluminum “space” blankets. Hundreds have contracted the coronavirus within these facilities, and hundreds more are at risk of being trafficked as they make their way to the border.
And we’re to believe this isn’t a crisis?
“Children presenting at our border, who are fleeing violence, who are fleeing prosecution, who are fleeing terrible situations is not a crisis,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a briefing on Monday.
By all standards, the situation down at the border is a severe humanitarian crisis. Border officials expect to encounter more than 117,000 children crossing the border illegally by the end of the year. That number is higher than the 68,000 detained during the Obama administration’s 2014 surge and the 80,000 who arrived during the Trump administration’s 2019 crisis. President Biden’s own Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted the United States is on track to face its largest surge in illegal immigration in two decades. If Biden doesn’t get a handle on this now, things will get much worse.
But Biden doesn’t even have plans to visit the border.
“I don’t have any trips to preview for you,” Psaki said. “I can tell you the president is briefed regularly on the situation at the border.”
Vice President Kamala Harris was also asked whether she’d make a trip to one of the detention facilities, and she appeared to laugh off the question.
Vice President @KamalaHarris laughs after she is asked if she has plans to visit the border.
Read more: https://t.co/NaNPhtB1f6 pic.twitter.com/tZXOhWoWnD
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 22, 2021
If the Biden administration wanted us to believe it has things under control, this would not be its response. The truth is that Biden has no idea how to solve the border problem, in part because he knows the only solutions available to him are the ones he just repealed.
Biden promised illegal immigrants a path to amnesty and legal citizenship and exempted minors from a Trump-era rule that allows for the swift removal of illegal immigrants seeking asylum due to the coronavirus. He ended the “Remain in Mexico” plan that required asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting their court date and overturned the “safe-third-country” agreement that forced migrants to apply for asylum in a nation south of the U.S. before coming here. Biden halted construction of Trump’s border wall even though workers had only 17 miles left to finish.
It does not matter how many times Biden tells migrants not to travel to the U.S. They will continue to come because his policies have encouraged them to. And the only way they’ll stop is if Biden puts his foot down, both politically and rhetorically.
But he won’t crack down on illegal immigration for the same reason he won’t admit it is a crisis: because then he’d have to admit that maybe, just maybe, Trump was right about a few things after all.
