Understanding the Brouhaha Over Biden’s Use of a Facility to House Unaccompanied Minors

While a Trump-era order to expel anyone crossing the border remains largely in effect, the new administration has allowed such minors to enter the country.

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News out of Texas this week that the Biden administration has reopened a Trump-era migrant facility to house unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the southern border has prompted complaints of hypocrisy from the right and criticism from progressives who view the move as a major misstep from the Biden administration.

The Biden administration insists that what is happening on the southern border is not at all like what happened during the Trump administration. At her daily press conference on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki made this distinction: “We have a number of unaccompanied minors—children—who are coming into the country without their families. What we are not doing—what the last administration did was separate those kids, rip them from the arms of their parents at the border.”

In 2018, the Trump administration instituted a “zero-tolerance policy” that purposefully separated children from parents when they were caught crossing the border illegally, citing a wish to deter families from doing so. In a January 2019 study, HHS found that at least 2,737 children were separated from their parents. However, because of a lack of data and other complexities, that number may be much higher. Instead of deterrence, though, what resulted was a massive public outcry and, ultimately, a withdrawal of the policy from the Trump administration in June 2018.

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  1. david rae

    I don't understand the difference between the parents who would allow their children to be taken away from them at the border, and those who send their children unaccompanied to the border. Aren't the parents in both cases hoping their children will be better off in America, hoping they'll be united with relatives? Wouldn't the second group be more susceptible to human trafficking?

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  2. Counterpoint

    Congress really needs to act on immigration policy to decide how we’re going to proceed. Congress will likely not act, and thus we are going to continue to have a confusing and ever changing set of policies driven by judges, executive appointees, etc.

    Forget about what the best policy is - the current situation is grossly inhumane. It encourages people to trek thousands of miles to wind up with their fate decided by a giant uncaring bureaucracy. It encourages minors to cross unaccompanied. It refuses to lay out a set of rules people can follow, makes changes arbitrarily, and then argues that people should follow the rules.

    Enough!

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    Ohio Gas Hog

    A very helpful piece to me as I try to understand better this immigration mess.

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    Kelvin Tsang

    Really appreciate this article for clearing things up.

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    Victor Clairmont

    Problem is, is that whatever laws for the border we create never seems to be enforced or then changed when a new administration comes into power. It’s a political nightmare. From the gang bangers/drug cartels that run people up here in a billion dollar industry along with the drug trade, the killing of people along the border and in Mexico by cartels to keep the traffic flowing, to the back and forth policy seesaw that Washington DC does that has not stopped the tide of immigration south of the border for over 30 years...

    The child in cages/detention/holding as bad as it may seem, is one of the smaller problems of our border crisis. I mean, think of it this way, in 250 years the black population represents 13% of the population. In the last half a century alone, the Latino population exceeded the black one and stands around 18%.

    The displacement and change is so rapid, but organizational democrats are happy to have a demographic they think votes for them and organizational republicans are happy with the influx of cheap labor.

    And criticize the house and it’s problems, and it becomes a “why don’t you care about immigrants?”. People, drug cartels are running them up here while normally raping the women/girls. Or, the fabled “they do the work no Americans will do”, which is false because before Covid we saw the job market across almost all job sectors go up and unemployment drop in both black and white communities, as they took on many of the jobs the upper class said they wouldn’t.

    It’s a whole mess of a situations. And it is not going to be fixed anytime soon. Meanwhile, America foots the bill in other ways as 36 billion in remittances go to Mexico alone (laughably, one of highest incomes Mexico gets is from remittances). It actually set a record during Covid. That money flows out and takes awhile to come back (tax remittances please).

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2A12CI

    It’s. A. Mess.

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      Pat Riot

      There's that canard again: do you *really* think Democrats are in favor of immigration because they expect that, in a generation, their citizen children will vote Democrat? Seriously?

      You really think they can all think ahead 30 years in lock-step unison like that? Do you really think that would even work?

      In the 2020 election, hispanics shifted somewhat to Trump because many retail and restaurant workers who are hispanic were convinced that the Democrats caused the shutdowns. Yes, it's at the margin, but here's the thing: it totally kills the above theory because it's proof that human beings can *decide* who to vote for even though they... had parents who weren't born on US soil.

      Like all conspiracy theories, this breaks down when you start getting into the *actual details* of how it supposedly works.

      By the way, the 36 billion that is sent to Mexico is individual's own money. Are you against how people spend their own money? If so, how should people be forced to spend the money they earn?

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        Victor Clairmont

        Yes. I in so believe organizational democrats (I said originally organizational not normal democrats) are in favor of that old canard.

        If immigrants were in an influx of republicans, they would not want them.

        Hence why many even here in the comment sections, go after Cubans in Florida, and were pooping their pants on election night when we were not sure who would be president after seeing the Latino surge for Trump.

        And migration and voting is not a conspiracy theory. It’s courted. If I offer a demographic incentives to stay, get housing/health care, and other funding, it is an incentive to stick with me also. Some people are sympathetic, but incentives also go along parallel. After all as Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a crisis go to waste”.

        You don’t need 30 years of planning. If I see a demographic over the years vote a certain way, specially when they become citizens and they say, “when my parents who were illegal got (insert x, y, or z), they were more incentivized or did vote democrat when they were legal, it becomes almost common sense to keep policies in place that keep them being your voters.

        And again, Cubans are demonized by organized democrats because they vote Republican. After the 2020 election they were being questioned as imbeciles, or being conned. No, they saw the policies of enlarging the government and state as similar to the policies in Venezuelan that made the ex-patriots.

        As for the spending money issue, you left out that remittances also are from illegals (most of it) working here. Thus if you are illegal, and send money outside the US, you should be taxed. Citizens of the US should not be.

        It would be a small deterrence for the large amount of all single men crossing the border for jobs, not fleeing for their lives.

        100% in favor of it. Keep the money flowing here, and not sent back to Mexico (or Central America) for an even more corrupt government that can’t handle the Drug cartels or its own problems. We have enough domestic problems here to deal with.

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          Pat Riot

          So was Reagan part of this conspiracy when he also tried to push for sensible plans on how to deal with immigrants? And the various business concerns who want cheaper labor--are they in on it too?

          And regardless of whether they are doing it or not--do you really think it will *work*? We're talking about 30 years into the future or more until these people have children who are old enough to vote. A million things can happen in politics during that time. Put it this way, the Q-Anon prophecies are not something I particularly worry about coming true even though a lot of people believe them.

          Tax evasion is indeed illegal in the USA, which is why most undocumented immigrants pay income taxes on their wages. If you don't think the enforcement is strong enough and maybe the IRS needs more money to do enforcement, well I guess you could make that case (and ROI analysis would be key).

          Whether you are a citizen or not doesn't change the law for the IRS or anything else.

          Now, if you are talking about punishing those who evade their immigration paperwork by precluding them from wiring money outside of the US, I suppose that's possible, but it would seem like this would just lead to lots of envelops full of cash being carted across the border. (I suspect that most of that $36 billion is from people who *have* the proper paperwork or are citizens, companies, and so forth but I could be wrong).

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            Victor Clairmont

            No. There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy for obvious profit.

            And Reagan is part of this whole problem. He offered amnesty, then said the border would be fixed.

            It should have been the other way around. Because the border was never fixed, we have the same exact problem 30ish years later of amnesty being offered a second time, with no fix in sight, to an even larger population of undocumented people.

            This kids in cages thing is a secondary problem, to the primary one:

            The border.

            And we are not talking 30 years into the future.

            We see the trends of 1st generation Latinos over the past half a century. They voted primarily democrat (still do), even with the gains from Trump in the last election.

            Democrats, and republicans know this and plan their campaigns around it (especially at the state level). Hence the democrats and their minority courting and republicans trying to drive out the Caucasian vote. The only Latino’s republicans seem to court are the ones in Florida.

            In 2012, more than 11 million Mexicans from migration resided in the US, making up 30% of the migration population.

            Roughly 62% of that population was illegal, meaning the remittances come from the majority of illegals (the paper I am linking goes through also the average staying of illegals for work, around 2 years and many go back to their homeland, many pay remittances to the cartels that helped them cross the border):

            https://www.jstor.org/stable/23215369?seq=1

            Currently, South America is taking over in the illegal immigration in 2021 and has over taken the Mexican portion of the majority of immigrants. But that’s a different dynamic shift that can/may/will push beyond the Mexican population if trends keep up. There is still only slightly over 11 to almost 12 million Mexicans now in the US, with Mexican Americans comprise 11.3% of the U.S. population and 61.5% of all Latino Americans.

            Anyways, not to belabor to point. If we want kids in cages to go away, or amnesty problems to go, the border needs to be fixed.

            Which I guess doesn’t serve any single organized parties idea anyways. So, it won’t get fixed.

            Well, maybe not anytime soon.


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          Victor Clairmont

          *Cuban for Cuban, but also Venezuelan of course.

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    Julie from Texas

    I agree with having temporary options like this Carrizo Springs facility while we work on better immigration policies overall. However, immigration is a multifaced issue, and thus far every time Congress tries to do something about it, lawmakers get flak about one or another part of the proposed bill, and then nothing gets passed. It's so frustrating, as this has been an issue for my entire life (living in Texas). We also need to weave our domestic immigration approach into foreign policy efforts to promote civil rights and living conditions in Central and South America, so that those residents won't have every reason to risk the journey, the crossing, and the potential for deportation just to give their families a better life. Let's hope the Biden administration and the current Congress finally take on this issue responsibly! (I'm not highly optimistic, but hopeful.)

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    Pat Riot

    So Biden is letting children who show up in our country by themselves stay here and is taking care of them. What a terrible, terrible thing.

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      Xaveria

      Ehhhh .... I dunno.

      If the Biden policy is encouraging poor people to dump their children across the border, that is kind of a terrible thing. Children suffer when they are separated from their parents. It is super, super, super bad for them long term.

      There must be a middle ground between "We'll take your children by force if you cross the border," and "If you abandon your children across the border, we'll provide them with a good home."

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        Pat Riot

        Would it be so bad if the United States took in abandoned children? Is that the kind of country you want to live in, or do you want to live in the other one that takes care of children?

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          Xaveria

          It is not bad to take in abandoned children. It *would* be bad if United States policy actively encouraged children to be abandoned, who would not be abandoned otherwise, yes. Children don't just need money, they need loving parents and family. Our foster care system, to which such abandoned children would be relegated, does not have the resources to provide that even to the children we currently have in that system.

          Things aren't always cut and dry. It's like foreign adoption. A lot of very kind people spent a lot of money adopted abandoned Chinese children in the 90s. Within a few years, there was a thriving market, both of poor people selling their children to orphanages in the hopes of their being adopted, and of people stealing children to sell to foreigners. If you knew that that would happen, is it moral to continue to allow foreign adoption?

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            Pat Riot

            It's moral to allow foreign adoption and immoral to allow people to intentionally sell their children for profit. This isn't isn't hard, at least logically. Yes, it gets complicated in the real world but that's why we have law enforcement.

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    2. DPito

      If the goal is to incentivize illegal crossings, then yes, it is a terrible thing. Many of us believe that such incentivization is the goal.

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      1. Anonymous

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          Kevin Johnson

          Your dismissive, disrespectful, and insulting tone is unfit for reasonable discourse. Even if you are correct, this is no way to treat people.

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            Pat Riot

            Done.

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    3. Michael A. Lagana

      This is more complex than just taking care of the child. If you found a 10 year old girl at your front door without her parents, and later found out she had travelled with strangers for over 2000 miles to get to your front door, you would turn her over to the authorities who would treat her with dignity--and then you'd find the abusive parent who turned her loose and risked her rape or death on that journey.

      Are we creating more rape victims? More child traffickers when we welcome those children?
      Do we turn the child over to an abusive family member or someone posing as a family member? Is that person documented? Did they come in the same entourage? This is about the child and it's about much more than that. mal

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        Pat Riot

        I don't understand. Are you suggesting we treat children badly in order to scare them away?

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        1. Michael A. Lagana

          Do you read? This is what I wrote: "you would turn her over to the authorities who would treat her with dignity--"

          I've always thought the best solution would be a combination of these policies: inform Mexico publicly that they need to take care of their own citizens and flat out inform them that anyone who comes through Mexico from Central America will be sent back. Build a solution with respect to how many immigrants from Mexico and Central America we let in the country so we do not displace American labor. All of these can be done...if the primary goal of our government and business community wasn't to troll for votes or cheap labor. Difficult? Of course. mal

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            Pat Riot

            But without carrying out the threat, how can it have any effect? Do you think we could maintain a lie like that?

            Also, non-citizens don't vote and child labor is illegal in the USA. The idea that immigration is a Democratic conspiracy obtain new votes is simply bonkers.

            Certainly cheap agricultural labor has been a pull for immigrants for the last 60 years but the solution is to simply enact and/or enforce our labor laws such that companies cannot treat these people any different than they would any citizen. Then the free market would sort that problem out.

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    Jason

    Well done Ryan. A bit too much space for Neumann, especially giving her the last word/tone setter. Krikorian is only half right, they didnt back themselves into a corner, this is the explicit result of the policy - more folks allowed in - that's the goal.

    If you do a follow up: what testing do they receive re COVID? Do they consent to it? Also, what role does DHS play in info-sharing with ORR (likely in DHS) and HHS? Is anyone tracking with the families they've placed the kids into that they actually show up for their hearings or is this the de facto amnesty that the mandated release dates typically result in?

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  9. Merlin

    President Biden has managed to unite the aggressive Progressives and the aggressive Regressives on this issue. He has got to be doing something right!

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