The Democratic Party spent four years condemning the Trump administration’s immigration policies, focusing specifically on the plight of “kids in cages.”
Now, President Biden and his backers have to find a way to square their previous rhetoric with the fact they, too, have found it necessary to round up and detain (even more) migrant children in holding facilities known for disease, hunger, and overcrowding.
“When we have kids in cages, crying for mommies and daddies, we know, we are better than this,” said Vice President Kamala Harris on June 30, 2018.
Earlier, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said, “I think this is a moral crime that is going on in our nation, and this administration should answer for what they’ve done.”
“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border,” declared Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, “and that is exactly what they are. … I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”
Today, things have taken a marked turn for the worse — worse than anything seen under former President Donald Trump. A record number of migrant children languish in U.S. Customs and Border Protection centers that are just days away from reaching “maximum capacity.” Many of those more than 3,200 children have been detained for longer than the three days allowed by law.
But don’t call it “kids in cages”!
Call it “overflow facilities.” Call it “reception centers.” Call it “detention pods.” Hell, you can even call it “jail-like facilities.”
Just don’t call it “kids in cages,” says the White House.
“This is not kids being kept in cages,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Feb. 23 in response to a question about the administration’s decision to reopen a holding facility in Texas. “This is a facility that was opened that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication. Certainly not.”
On Monday, again addressing the Biden White House’s decision to reopen immigration centers shuttered during the Trump administration and put children into cages, Psaki maintained the White House is detaining migrant children the right way.
“We’ve made a policy decision, as an administration, that the humane and moral approach is to keep these kids safe and get them into facilities that are safe,” she said, adding, “It is an area of policy discussion, how will we continue to accommodate, in a safe and humane way, these kids.”
Naturally, the Biden White House has found a sympathetic audience in the corporate press, including the New York Times, which reports the Biden administration has taken a “more humane” approach to “those seeking entry into the county.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, describes one facility in Texas thus: “There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word ‘Bienvenidos,’ or welcome, on a banner on its roof … The most colorful trailer is at the entryway, where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls from Carrizo’s first opening in 2019.”
Oh, well, in that case!
More seriously, there’s a reason why the Obama administration put migrant children in gated pens in the first place. There’s a reason why failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supported strict immigration policies during the 2016 election.
Democrats knew then, as they’ve known all along, that there is a crisis at the border and that many children are being trafficked. They simply pretended otherwise during the Trump years because the “kids in cages” attack line was simply too good to pass up.
Now, Democrats are faced with the same problems as the previous administration. But unlike the previous administration, they now have to reconcile taking realistic, unpleasant actions to ameliorate the crisis with their hyperbolic, self-righteous, social justice rhetoric of the past four years. It can’t be much fun.
