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Over the past decade, three US presidents have each faced a humanitarian emergency on the southern border. Barack Obama did so in 2014, when tens of thousands of children from Central America arrived, without their parents, to seek asylum. Five years later, under Donald Trump and the toughest border enforcement regime in more than half a century, record numbers of children and families overwhelmed federal authorities. Now, two months after the start of Joe Bidens’ presidency, it’s his turn. Last Thursday, the subject dominated the first press conference he gave since taking office. What we were doing right now is attempting to rebuild the system that can accommodate what is happening today, he said. That will take time.
Illustration by Joe Farm
There are currently some eighteen thousand unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. custody, including more than five thousand who remain in holding cells, as the government scrambles to find space to house them. Republicans who were silent when Trump separated migrant children from their parents and eviscerated the asylum system are now denouncing the Bidens border crisis. The message seems to be effective; its causing all kinds of confusion. Biden denies 40% of asylum-seeking families and virtually all single adults arriving at the border, under a controversial Trump policy known as Title 42, which he left in place. Even so, everyone from TV news anchors to the president of Mexico blames Biden for encouraging more migrants to travel north because he has vowed to stop Trump’s reckless cruelty. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn tweeted that Biden emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status. He understood it as a criticism.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has predicted that the United States will encounter more migrants by the end of 2021 than it has at any time in the past two decades. He also, like the rest of the Administration, avoided calling the situation a crisis. This is nothing new, he said. We have already experienced migratory surges. What is new, however, is the pace: during most of March, around five hundred and fifty children arrive at the border every day. Mayorkas and Biden went on television to announce the border closure; During a White House press briefing, Roberta Jacobson of the National Security Council made the announcement in Spanish. But he was speaking more to critics in Congress than to the people of Honduras and Guatemala, the countries from which most families and children come.
The word crisis is both an exaggeration and an underestimation of the situation. There were more families and children seeking asylum on the border under Trump in 2019 than there are now. And the current numbers, while higher than Biden predicted, are not unexpected. The pandemic has led to renewed desperation in Central America, as have two hurricanes that devastated the region last fall, displacing tens of thousands of people. Yet in another sense, the situation is worse than much of the public realizes, as the issues at stake are genuinely complex and almost impossible to resolve as long as policymakers in Washington continue to take decency as a sign. political weakness rather than moral strength. .
The emergencies of the past decade are really three chapters in the same struggle: an exodus from Central America is underway, as families and children struggle to escape violence, poverty and corruption in the world. government. The border immigration system, which was put in place in the 1990s with Mexico’s single adults and job seekers in mind, was not designed to handle an asylum-seeking population on this scale. On average, it takes nearly two and a half years to resolve a refugee claim, and there is now a backlog of 1.3 million pending cases, up from half a million under Obama.
Biden faces another burden: By the time Trump stepped down, he had effectively ended the practice of asylum and left the most vulnerable to fend for themselves. Some seventy thousand asylum seekers have been forced to wait indefinitely in Mexico under a policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols. Trump has also, in the name of a questionable public health order issued last March, turned back nearly everyone seeking asylum at the border, including some 16,000 children and 34,000 families. This order had the perverse effect of causing people to attempt to cross several times; in the past year, there have been more than five hundred thousand evictions. Biden planned to gradually resume the asylum program, partly for operational reasons and partly for political reasons. If the administration appeared to be floundering, it would give Republicans an opening to attack its broader agenda, which includes legislation to expand the legal immigration system and pave the way for citizenship for eleven million living undocumented immigrants. already in this country.
The number of unaccompanied children, however, has exceeded the government’s ability to place them in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for placing them with family sponsors. The priority is to prevent them from languishing in the holding cells run by the Department of Homeland Security; by law, children are not expected to stay in these establishments for more than 72 hours. But HHS shelters are almost at full capacity. Nine emergency shelters have been set up, two at convention centers in Dallas and San Diego, but the average time many children spend in DHS facilities is almost double the legal limit. Were planning space again to be able to get these children out, Biden said Thursday, adding that he had used all available resources to free up an additional five thousand beds, at a military base in Texas.
The Administration has rightly said that the problem must be addressed at the source. To do so, he intends to provide more aid to Central America and target it in a way that bypasses corrupt officials. The White House is also keen to revive a program started under Obama and ended by Trump, to treat children as refugees in their home countries and set up regional facilities to speed up their legal claims before children reach life. border. The plans are ambitious and still largely untested, and, as Biden admitted, they will take time, years, not months, to implement.
Trump has sought to hide the issue of asylum south of the border. Biden pays a price to bring him back to sight. The question is whether he can withstand the political onslaught long enough to begin to turn things around.
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