The only sensible policy is stop accepting anyone, and fund agencies in Mexico to return children to countries they are coming from. Plus good policies in those countries to build them up.
If we continue to keep accepting people who cross the border, they will keep coming. We are encouraging parents to send their kids up here. Even worse during a pandemic.
If you look into the full numbers there were massively more deportations under the obama/biden administration than under the trump administration. So my assumption(which could be incorrect) is that this is just business as usual.
Now, I'm not sure about the total apprehension numbers as the above mentioned stat could be gamed by holding people instead of deporting them. When I was looking into this I couldn't find those (apprehension) numbers by year anywhere.
Dismissing a 100,000 foreign individuals crossing your border as "a bunch of kids" is even more disingenuous and further fuels the issues the anti-immigration folk have. 100,000 is not peanuts. As the other commenter mentioned, that's a bigger than probably hundreds of towns in the USA.
Anywho, if we really "cared" about all the "bunch of kids" suffering in Mexico, we would have invaded Mexico and installed a "democratic" government years ago.
If somebody has an informative link, I'm curious why this is still an issue.
My understanding is that guides are using children as accessories/human shields, so the US govt. is unsure of who the parents are or where they're from, so they're detained?
Prior to 2020, I considered this one of the country's greatest shames, but maybe there's some plausible operational excuse for it. I sure hope so.
If people are coming across the border with kids that they don’t have proof are theirs, what do you do?
Do we send the kids back across the border with the adults that brought them across?
How do we find the parents of these kids once they are detained?
It seems like a hard problem to me. Ideally we’d reunite these kids with their parents. The logistics of finding the parents of thousands of undocumented minors is pretty intense.
The thing is that some Trump defenders tried to make up stories about seperating kids die to trafficking to justify the Trump administration purposely seperating children from their parents to be cruel in the hope that cruelty would deter legal(assylum seekers) and illegal immigration.
In the process they lost track of where kids parents were due to incompetence
Yes, it's long been known that it was a lie and excuse, it's sad that people on this site somehow aren't aware of this. Trump had two neo-nazis in his administration, this is just some of the fallout of that.
It's still an issue because the problem isn't solved, I guess. The border is porous and the country is divided as to whether or not they want to repeal immigration laws or allow foreigners to break them. But hey, if it was me I'd build a wall and prevent the children from being dragged into this by (maybe well-meaning) adults in the first place.
Less than a month ago there were just NINE children being held, according to CBP documents cited in the CBS report. There are a further 8,100 migrant children being held at the Office of Refugee Resettlement. [0]
It was actually the Child Separation policy enacted by Trumps government that was meant to deter immigration. You're the only one operating on bad faith here.
The politics around this are absolutely mind-bendingly stupid.
If you support putting children in cages and think its GOOD: You're a horrible person! Fascist!
If you support putting children in cages but HATE that we have to do it (for their own good! We have no better options!): A rational, sensible liberal way to see things!
If you think the migrant crisis requires a more humanitarian approach, and that they should be given better accommodations and we should reevaluate our Latin American policy to prevent such things: Tankie! You're being unrealistic! You support open bordered!
Really drives home how so much of American politics is just aesthetics. You can do bad things you just have to acknowledge their bad and feel bad about them. But not dwell on it too much because that helps the opposition.
The politics are not what they appear. Free movement advocates found a broadly appealing wedge (children being caged, malnourished and freezing/boiling) and have successfully made a large chunk of Americans anti-border control.
Whether the neoliberal politicians flip flop is not the point, the goal is to move the Overton Window of the conversation.
In case you were hoping for facts from the MSM, that hasn't existed for a few years now. I mostly watch NTD Media now.
Back in the 80s/90s, although it had inaccuracies, the US media wasn't part of the Red Terror.
Glenn Greenwald, who's based in Brazil now, has explained that his US journalist friends must toe the cultural Marxist line or they're cancelled (fired and disowned by all journo friends.)
Why NTD Media in particular? I hadn't heard of them before so I looked them up and it looks like they'd have their own particular bias. That's not some kind of judgement as basically all media has some kind of bias.
The problem is when the context is that the Trump administration was cruel on purpose as part of their war on immigration it makes them look worse not better
Another rare instance where I think you're just straight-up wrong. The contexts are radically different: Trump separated children from their families universally and deliberately, for the explicit purpose of deterring immigration. That's not at all what Biden is doing (or what Obama did).
It's a popular "dunk" on Democrats and "resistance" types, but I'm sure you can see that what it also does is normalize deterrent family separation, as if it was something we have routinely done historically (it was not).
The AP isn't always right (how weird would it be if they were?) but they are in this case.
> WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama assailed President Donald Trump on Monday for ripping migrant children from their parents and throwing them into cages, picking up on a frequent and distorted point made widely by Democrats.
> THE FACTS: The reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.
Rayiner's characterization that the AP has never provided "context" for what Trump did is wrong per the above link, which could actually be found in the original link cited.
By way of example: WaPo today, reporting on the peak of children in HHS custody under Biden, comparing unfavorably to Trump, leaves out that those children are confined for an average of 4.5 days before being transferred to family members and sponsors. During Trump's family separation program, that number was 154 days, and in some cases for over a year.
I have barely been following the "children in cages" thing and know very little about it and have almost no context for it. Can someone explain why OP is being downvoted? This goes with what I've (very passively) seen, as far as I know the Biden administration has not done very much to change this, but I have noticed that the narrative has lightened up on this since he was elected
I personally don't downvote opinions, but my assumption is that the OP is taking 'children in cages' out of context, and is also making a rhetorical point that all Trump opposition is based on personal hatred of him, and that they believe suddenly everything is fine because Biden is in charge.
There are definitely two sides to the story, and a certain amount of research will make that clear, which the OP does not acknowledge.
The controversy was a very specific and cruel Trump administration policy to separate children from their families by automatically criminalizing crossings (typically border crossings are civil rather than criminal offenses, until criminality has been established). It specifically came out of Stephen Miller's 'zero tolerance' policy for illegal immigration. Many of those involved (with the strong exception of Miller himself) have expressed regret for enacting the policy, because it led to permanent separations of children from their parents, before the typical standards of criminal behavior were met. Obviously that is a tremendous trauma for children.
Indeed, there has been misinformation from the opposition, taking pictures of children behind fences out of context in order to make the policy seem more cruel. While in my strong opinion the policy was cruel and was very much intended to be cruel, people on all political sides can and do use social media manipulations to make fallacious points. It's never just 'those people' doing it. So the waters are muddied. I think a good HN post acknowledges the muddiness of the situation, rather than a black-and-white pronouncement--hence the downvoting.
I recall that last October Trump's people, in a move that was as petty as it was somewhat dead-on, made the Wifi password for the Press "WhoBuiltTheCagesJoe?"
I think it ought to have been the SSID, myself, and the password being the correct answer, but I suppose it was a start.
If we continue to keep accepting people who cross the border, they will keep coming. We are encouraging parents to send their kids up here. Even worse during a pandemic.