EL PASO, Texas — Assuming everything that the Border Patrol told a group of journalists here on Thursday is true, and that everything we saw in the migrant detention facilities is how they typically operate, here is the good news: Democrats can rest assured that every illegal immigrant child crossing in to the United States, either with a parent or not, is well fed, clothed, and cared for, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Here’s the rest of the news: Democrats can also rest assured that they have effectively won the immigration fight.
Recommended Stories
President Trump had said he wanted to allow press in to some of the Border Patrol detention centers in Texas so I and several other reporters last week toured two separate facilities: one in El Paso that holds families, and the other in Clint, which holds unaccompanied minors.
The El Paso facility was like an air-conditioned warehouse, supplemented with air-conditioned tents, where families are processed and then wait for their next destination. That’s usually whatever American city they were trying to reach, as they’re turned loose with a notice to appear in court one or two years later.
The Clint facility, which was described recently by the New York Times as “the stuff of nightmares,” was more or less the same. There was one main room that had several other rooms within it, where unaccompanied minors are separated by age and sex.
I thought I was there to see a war zone, mentally preparing myself for the overwhelming stench of crowded rooms where dozens of people are sharing one toilet, but that’s not what it was. The rooms were mostly empty. The El Paso facility had what appeared to be about 30 migrants. The Clint one had less than 20 minors. And it was pristine in its cleanliness, stocked with food, water, and games for everyone. I was expecting Vietnam. What I saw was the Venetian.
Trump and the heads of the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security have all been saying for months that the sheer volume of illegal immigrants flowing in to the country is crushing whatever system we had in place to begin with, and that there simply weren’t enough resources to manage the tide.
Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who was present for the tour, credited the slowdown in the migration to the Mexican government’s efforts to halt Central Americans passing through on their way to the U.S. And deputy chief patrol agents Clayton Thomas and Chris Clem said the reduction in volume is now allowing for quicker processing of illegal immigrants.
But when I asked McAleenan about recent reports that Mexican officials were taking bribes to let Central Americans continue their journey to the U.S., he said that was “a great question for Mexico.” When I asked him how Homeland Security efforts in Guatemala were going in attempting to slow down Hondurans and Salvadorans making the same journey from further south, he said they were going well but had no data on their efficacy. He only said that he had a “sense” that operations were working.
And agents were proud to say that they had developed smoother systems for processing the endless stream of migrants coming in to the U.S. by outsourcing meal preparation and laundering to contractors, thus freeing up more hands for more and more administrative work.
This is all another way of saying we still don’t have control over the border, and that for all we know, the number of migrants crossing in to the country is set to spike again once the blazing desert heat cools down and makes the journey for them safer. This is all another way of saying we’ve made the welcoming process for everyone south of Texas a lot nicer.
The purpose of the tours was to convince the news media that border patrol is working hard to care for every single sick and impoverished migrant showing up at the border, providing the cleanest facilities possible and three meals per day, with snacks in between. Mission accomplished.
But what about the actual policy that Trump campaigned on, the one about stopping illegal immigration altogether? What about changing the backward system we currently abide by so that we would no longer be, as Trump said in his beloved 2015 campaign launch at Trump Tower, “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems”?
As fire-breathing as Trump can be toward the media when he’s safely holed up somewhere tweeting or behind a podium, he cringes under official scrutiny. And that’s what this media tour of the detention facilities was — a submission to Democrats, who have won the immigration fight.
