Nearly 25,000 migrant children were in the custody of the government, apart from their families, in early May.
The number of unaccompanied migrant children in the federal government’s care is at an all-time high, easily eclipsing the corresponding total in 2018 when the Trump administration pursued a policy that led to the intentional separation of children from their families, eliciting major controversy.
The situation underscores the severity of the crisis facing President Joe Biden early in his administration and the moral quandary he faces. Biden officials maintain that they are resolving a problem created by the Trump administration and claim that they are providing better conditions for the children in their care.
BORDER FENTANYL SEIZURES SOARING AS CARTELS PUSH DANGEROUS DRUGS
Republicans, though, argue that Biden’s permissive stance on illegal immigration, particularly his decision not to turn away children, is the reason that so many have made the dangerous trek to the border and ended up separated from their parents — in effect, that he has indirectly caused the kind of family separations for which he denounced former President Donald Trump.
The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal entity responsible for caring for the unaccompanied migrant children, reported on May 4 that 22,195 children were in its custody a day earlier, more than at any other time in U.S. history, including when the Trump administration separated families in 2018 and during the 2014 and 2019 surges of children to the border. An additional 2,000 children were in the custody of other federal agencies.
During the period of the Trump administration’s “zero toleration” policy that separated families at the border, children were held in Border Patrol facilities, sometimes for weeks at a time, that featured chain link barriers separating groups. The appearance of the facilities led to the accusation that the administration was holding children in “cages.”
Now, even though more children are coming across the border than at any point during the Trump administration, the government is more quickly transferring the children to HHS facilities specially built to accommodate children humanely. As a result, immigrant advocates and experts are not upset with the Biden administration, a key reason there has been less uproar.
“The Biden administration has certainly been responsive, which is reflected by the sharp drop in children currently being held in [Border Patrol] facilities,” Krish Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, wrote in an email.
Early on, the Biden administration stopped turning away children, as was being done to prevent filling Border Patrol and HHS facilities with people during the coronavirus pandemic. However, the change meant children would have to be held somewhere while the government searched for an adult in the U.S. to release the child to.
After the change, the number of children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border began rising from 5,689 in January to 18,663 in March, the most ever encountered in a month. However, some people said the increase was due to push factors in Central America, including major natural disasters over the past year that have made living there more difficult, as well as the pent-up demand for migration from the Trump years.
“The high number of kids in U.S. custody is a result of the pent-up demand of children fleeing danger and seeking protection in the United States who were barred from entering for one year during the Trump Administration. The Biden Administration did the right thing, albeit the harder one, in allowing these children a chance to seek safety,” Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy for Kids In Need of Defense, wrote in an email.
The difference in the Trump and Biden administrations’ responses to surges of children is considerable, Podkul said. The Biden administration moved quickly to put up emergency HHS facilities so that the government would not have to hold children in Border Patrol stations for weeks, as it had in 2019, but would be able to shift the children quickly to facilities staffed with child care workers. HHS opened 13 overflow facilities nationwide.
“While the Emergency Intake Shelters that are housing unaccompanied children temporarily until they can be transferred to a fully-licensed facility or released to a sponsor are not ideal, they are a vast improvement over holding children for extended periods of time in CBP facilities which are not appropriate for children and have no staff trained to interact with children,” Podkul said.
Early in the year, the Border Patrol struggled to transfer children from its cramped stations to HHS. Border Patrol is the first agency to take custody of people who have come over without permission and is supposed to transfer people to other agencies within three days. Children were being held days longer than they were supposed to early on under Biden, but over the past two months, even as more children showed up at the border, they have quickly moved children to HHS. The number of children held by the Border Patrol dropped from 5,767 on March 28 to less than 800 per day in May.
But Trump officials have charged that the high number of children continuing to show up at the border is a problem of the White House’s own making and that the president himself is not doing enough to address it.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, said in March that the Biden policy would prompt more children to come, and his claim came true.
“The Biden administration’s lack of understanding of the power of incentives continues to baffle me: allowing unaccompanied minors to stay in the U.S. will yield a flood of unaccompanied minors,” Romney wrote on Twitter. “It’s de facto ‘child separation policy.’”
Biden has argued that resolving the root causes that are prompting people to come to the U.S. will take time and cannot happen overnight.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s immigration and cross-border policy director, argued that the White House was right to try to improve the conditions for children separated at the border while also working toward addressing the underlying causes of migration.
“They have thrown a lot of government resources in expanding HHS ORR influx center and shelter capacity,” she wrote in an email. “That is the first need: to get children out of CBP custody, but they are also pulling staff from around the federal government on a volunteer basis to staff these facilities.”
The Biden administration has sped up the release of children from federal custody to an adult in the U.S. so that they can take more children from Border Patrol into HHS facilities and keep up with the flow of children arriving. For example, adults who claim children are no longer fingerprinted as the Trump administration had required.
“We witnessed a chilling effect during the Trump-era, with sponsors fearful of detention and deportation should they come forward to claim a child,” Vignarajah said. “The Biden administration has also taken additional steps not implemented by its predecessor, such as embedding HHS officials in [Border Patrol] shelter facilities and re-instituting the Central American Minors program.”
“As I see it, the Biden administration is methodically trying to deal with the issues at each stage of the process,” Brown said. “While getting kids out of ORR custody doesn’t present the same pressing media pictures as getting them out of BP custody, it is important, and the Biden folks are working on it.”
Brown and Vignarajah said the situation at the border exposes deeper problems in the immigration court system, which has 1.1 million cases waiting to be decided by federal immigration judges, of whom there are fewer than 500 nationwide.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“We must build a more permanent infrastructure rooted in flexible, community-based care so that these cyclical and seasonal surges don’t so regularly create emergency situations,” said Vignarajah.
