Former President Donald Trump brought some order to the border — not with his much-vaunted wall, but with diplomacy. President Biden has already scrapped that diplomacy, in the process demolishing the border peace and triggering a humanitarian crisis. It didn’t even take him two months.
By the time Trump came into office, the story of traffic along our border with Mexico was no longer one of Mexicans seeking opportunity. Rather, it consisted of economic refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” passing through Mexico.
So, Trump brokered agreements with Northern Triangle nations based on the “safe third country” principle adhered to in Europe and other nations. Trump also leaned on Mexico to pull its weight in cracking down on caravans of migrants seeking to enter the United States without documentation.
Trump’s border diplomacy worked. In just one year, from the apex of the 2019 border crisis, border encounters between migrants and Customs and Border Protection fell by 88%.
Biden has recklessly reignited the border crisis by undoing the Trump administration’s diplomacy and having nothing in place to accommodate the resulting surge. As a result, Biden deserves blame for the humanitarian crisis and the deaths that will inevitably come as a result.
The new surge mostly consists of families seeking asylum, unaccompanied minors, and lone adults, some assisted by human smugglers or by human traffickers.
The result: Amid a pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services has had to cram children into overcapacity facilities. It has also let adults cross into the country without COVID-19 testing.
This is a crisis caused by irresponsible and bad policymaking. Specifically, it is being caused by an anti-Trump psychosis, on top of decades of legal activism by a Left hell-bent on eradicating American sovereignty.
Under international norms and U.S. law, the bar for asylum is high. Asylum status is not for those simply seeking a better life or greener pastures. According to U.S. law, refugees are people who cannot reasonably return to their country due to “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
An “asylum-seeker” is what we call a refugee who arrives at a border crossing seeking entry.
Plenty of migrants along the southern border, such as ethnic Mayans fleeing Guatemala’s legacy of genocide or Honduran women fleeing systemic femicide, may qualify for asylum. Under Trump’s diplomatic agreements, asylum-seekers were not simply turned away. But they were required to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reached. If you’re going north to flee Guatemala’s government, that doesn’t give you permission to enter the U.S.
As a result of this policy, which discouraged asylum applications obviously lacking merit, the U.S. received fewer asylum applications. One happy byproduct of this was that the government could process the ones it did receive more quickly. Caravans didn’t try to travel all the way across Mexico. Lives were saved that might have otherwise been lost.
But Biden has ended that. There is now an onslaught of migrants creating both a backlog and an overflow. And thanks to the left-wing legal movement, the White House is now presented with a dichotomy: either return to “catch and release,” of illegal immigrants, or put children in “cages.”
After years of litigation over what to do with minor migrants, Bill Clinton brokered the Flores settlement agreement, an attempt to reconcile the demands of immigration activists with legal developments.
Governments, sensibly, were required to release a child migrant to a parent, legal guardian, designated adult friend, or close relative “without unnecessary delay.” But another provision in Flores required that children be kept in the “least restrictive” setting — which means separate from their parents or guardians in border patrol custody.
So, left-wing activism forced border authorities either to separate children from their parents, sending them to HHS facilities, or to let all migrants into the U.S. without so much as a basic criminal background check.
The Trump administration tried to correct the Flores settlement to allow families to remain together in Homeland Security facilities while processing asylum claims. In response, the left-wing think tank the Center for American Progress falsely alleged that officials were trying to “indefinitely incarcerate children.”
Biden could give himself cover to reform Flores, and thus alleviate our crisis. But he’s doing the opposite, and thus filling up cages with children amid a pandemic. Again, he deserves blame for this irresponsible decision.
