The Biden Administration has directed FEMA to help shelter and transfer migrant children who are crossing unaccompanied into the United States at the border with Mexico.
FEMA is the Federal EMERGENCY Management Agency. They provide governmental assistance in times of EMERGENCIES — at times when the normal assistance available for various government agencies is insufficient to deal with the EMERGENCY.
Usually, that is a situation caused by an act of “Mother Nature.” But in the case of the Biden Administration, the EMERGENCY is caused entirely by the government — and it was entirely predictable.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said FEMA would help children found at the border to avoid being treated as detainees of Customs and Border Protection and move them more quickly into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Nearly 9,500 unaccompanied minors, most of them from Central America, entered U.S. border custody in February — a 21-month high. More than 7,000 of them were transferred to the U.S. refugee agency, which has been struggling to find enough bed space in its network of shelters….
The dwindling bed space at U.S. refugee agency shelters has created a massive backlog of minors in Border Patrol holding facilities, most of which were built to briefly detain adult migrants, not children. The number of children held in Border Patrol custody this week has averaged more than 3,000.
On Friday, CBS News reported that children detained at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in south Texas told lawyers they were being held in overcrowded conditions. The children also reported having to sleep on the floor, not being able to call family members, having limited access to showers and not seeing sunlight in nearly a week.
This is not a smart way to handle the problems of children expected to be future Democrat voters.
The overt and entirely political motivations behind the push by Democrat politicians to create a “path to citizenship” for some/all of the “Dreamers” — adults who were brought to the United States illegally as children by their parents — is the expectation that more, such newly-minted voters will vote for Democrats than Republicans.
Why would a new Democrat Administration have any different motivation, in terms of encouraging a continuing flow of migrant children into the country who are allowed in with the same expectation that they, too, will eventually be provided a similar “path to citizenship” — along with “Thank You Joe” buttons at various stops along the way?
But by placing unaccompanied children in the care of HHS, while returning adults accompanied by children back to Mexico — as the Biden Administration is doing — it is causing the predictable outcome that more parents will send their children unaccompanied across the border.
So many unaccompanied minors were showing up at the border in late winter that some observers believe a new humanitarian crisis could be brewing.
More than 3,200 unaccompanied migrant children are being housed in Customs and Border Protection holding facilities, NBC News reported Monday. More than half were being held in so-called “ice boxes” not intended for children because detainees can only be held in the cells for a maximum of three days.
The problem for the Biden Administration POLICY of not discouraging this illegal migration is that the flow is continuous — and shows no signs of letting up.
🚨Just In: 📜Video Was Taken In The South East Part Of Texas In The Morning Showing A Large Sized Crowd Of People Waiting For The Smugglers To Ferry Them Across The Rio Grande Into The United States#BorderCrisis #Texas pic.twitter.com/v3rZ7D5Vdu
— J̵̟̦̲̞̭̱̀̈́͑̄̇̈́̚͝ustice (@The_Justice7) March 11, 2021
Obviously, unaccompanied children do not arrive on the US side of the border with a “plan” for how to evade the Border Patrol and immigration authorities once they arrive. Rather, the “plan” is to find such officials and surrender themselves, and ask for “asylum.”
The public announcement that FEMA will be assisting in the effort to secure housing and care for the overflow of unaccompanied children likely only encourages parents of such children to take the risk and send them across the border alone.
FEMA’s expertise goes beyond merely providing housing — FEMA’s mission involves providing food, shelter, and the necessities of life for victims of natural disasters. Involving FEMA and HHS in the process — rather than taking aggressive steps to close the border or compel Mexico and Central American countries to stem the flow of illegal migrants — creates a situation where these children are going to become temporary “wards” of the federal government, unless family members in the United States step forward to take them in. Since the federal government is not equipped for long-term arrangements in this regard, the burden is going to fall to the states where these children are housed to care for them on a long-term basis.
This is not a sustainable policy — even for Democrats.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member