More than 4,000 unaccompanied migrant children are being kept in overcrowded facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to multiple reports.
âoverwhelmed the housing system.â
What a kind way to describe inhumanity.
They need to send reporters in to expose everything that happened there right away. People need to see exactly what Trumpâs policies did to these children.
The dire situation recalls a similar crisis under the Trump administration, during which migrant children were kept in squalid conditions at CBP facilities after being separated from their families at the border.
Well thatâs the rub, isnât it? Are they or arenât they being held in poor conditions? I wouldnât be the least bit surprised if CBP was continuing its general contempt for humanity, but none of these stories over the last week or so ever actually comment on the conditions of the confinement, just the confinement itself. It takes some time to process unaccompanied minors presenting themselves for asylum, and there appear to be rather a lot of them at the moment. Call me when the situation actually resembles the Trump administrationâs handling of previous yearsâ immigration surges (which always happen when the weather is favorable, i.e., the spring and fall).
âŚand now the Republicans that were FINE with letting the kids be separated from parents or dying on the other side of the border are on their way to âcheckâ so they can whine about immigration as opposed to Dr. Suess and Mr. Potato Head. We still wonât get to the truth.
They are not, so far as we know, separating children from their parents. These are unaccompanied minors. CBP has, however, still been preemptively deporting asylum-seekers to Mexico, which is awful unto itself. CBP and ICE are both out of control.
What did these children, the older ones at least, and their parents or guardians, think was going to happen when they tried to cross the border? Why is this continuing to happen and why arenât we addressing the root cause, broken countries run by corrupt and incompetent thugs and overrun by vicious drug gangs, which in turn is the result of over a century of horrible US Central American foreign policy intended to benefit US companies and keep these countries undemocratic and unstable.
Maybe itâs time we did something about that?
Yes. NPR has had some recent reporting from the southern border that, anecdotally, people from Central America are heading here because they have heard or have come to believe that the Biden administration is more permissive in letting people come across and staying in the U.S. Thereâs every reason to believe that facilities here havenât yet been expanded or improved much since the change in administration, and Bidenâs ending the âRemain in Mexicoâ policy means that some of those several tens of thousands of people have been permitted to enter as well.
Meanwhile, âmyâ rather Trump-y, newly-elected senator Roger Marshall has been down to McAllen to try to make political hay out of whatâs going on there. Heâs not been the first GOPer to visit, I donât believe.
Did any of these so concerned pols go down there when Trump was in office?
Thought so.
Where are they getting the idea that Bidenâs going to let them just come in, undocumented? Neither party is for âopen bordersâ No sane person is. You come and stay here, it has to be lawful, for your sake and ours. In the meantime, why arenât we setting up large tent cities to house these kids until we figure out what to do with them? Itâs almost spring so weather should allow that.
My guess is that there are still some trumpy sadists still hanging around being jerks, but that, this time around, there are many more efforts to see that there will be better conditions. And hopefully, the message of accountability will be getting through from the top down that the nasty behavior will not tolerated. Just like the pickup in the acquisition of vaccines by Bidenâs folks, I am hopeful there will be a focused effort to get needed supplies such as food, water, bedding, clothing and medical assistance, a decent plan for exercise, schooling, counselling, etc. to give these poor kids the support they need.
A problem of this size cannot be solved from one day to the next, and the ghastly intentional bungling of the past four years have made a bad situation even worse by cementing mindsets in a number of the folks working there. I hope there will be some very public examples made, and strongly enough, to ensure that the message is received that these kids need to be treated with as much dignity and humanity as possible.
Itâs just horrible.
Can this be stopped TPM? Biden is NOT Trump. The fact that these kids are being kept in Customâs facilities as they were under Trump is not sufficient to cast them the same. You can bet your ass their treatment is kinder now and theyâre kept informed as to what is to become of them. You can bet that same as the Biden policy is to eventually do something kind and helpful to these kids. NONE of that was the case under Trump. His goal was intentional cruelty.
Equating Biden to Trump is GOPâer shit. There is nothing in common with Trumpâs policies being done under Biden. Their purposes are at ends. Stop this shit.
And this is distinction that Trumpers canât grasp, in fact have never grasped about Trumpâs family separation policy. In the past the family was kept together, but by charging every adult that came to the US with a child/children as a crime then the kids by law couldnât be kept with the adult.
And thereâs the whole bottleneck of HHS and the ORR.
And why is it every single year that itâs a surprise when the number of adults, children, or both increase at this time. Itâs almost like Americans donât understand that temperatures rise in the desert during what most of us consider the Spring, and are deadly during the summer months.
Well Marshall does have to make a name for himself.
Honestly I sort of remember that there was an election for senator in KS, but it didnât stick in my brain who had won.
Yes some did, and they didnât see a problem.
From what Iâve heard, some of itâs driven by hope; some of it is âencouragedâ by coyotes who stand to profit from misinformation. The same reporting also notes just what you have said: The Biden administration has no desire to just throw the gates open, that people seeking asylum will still have to be processed.
I think many of these children are crossing to be with their parents or family members who are already here.
OT response: Marshall could make a name for himself by calming peopleâs nerves due to the flurry of earthquakes weâve had in Wichita yesterday and, this morning, not even 5 minutes ago. (3.4 magnitude, followed a few minutes later by a smaller one. We had one yesterday that was a 4.)
I would not make that bet. CBP, ICE, and really all of DHS seem to be pretty much rogue agencies who love nothing better than inflicting torture on brown people. But the mere act of holding unaccompanied minors in custody for a week or two while their situations get straightened out is not, by itself, any kind of news. Some reporting on actual conditions of confinement is in order, and nobody so far has provided any.