Six on History: Immigration and Refugees
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"The current emergency at the border has found the U. S. media at its most solipsistic. Coverage seems more focused on whether the emergency should be called “a crisis” (it should) and what the political fallout for the Biden administration will be. With few exceptions — like the remarkable work of MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff or Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez — many news outlets seem utterly uninterested in the stories of the migrants themselves.
WOLA asked children to give their testimonies of the horror they experienced. Karla was 14 when she was almost killed in Honduras for refusing to join a gang. She chose to “escape.” In Mexico, she encountered a new version of hell. Listening to her testimony is heartbreaking. As she describes being raped, she cannot bring herself to fully retell the experience. “They touched me a lot, they hurt me a lot,” she says. “I never imagined something like that.”
“These children have limited access to many of the essential services they need for their well-being,” a UNICEF study concluded in 2018. “They also run the risk of being exploited, abused or trafficked while traveling or in the vicinity of camps and rest centers on the border.” Two years later, a Human Rights Watch survey of children living under the Remain in Mexico confirmed the worst. “Many of those interviewed said that they or their family members suffered actual or threatened rape, sexual abuse, kidnapping, robbery, and other acts of violence after US immigration officials sent them to Mexico,” reads the report.
Read more:
"Upon assuming office, Biden has made a number of changes to Trump's immigration policy. Among other actions, Biden cut off funding for the construction of the border wall and suspended enrollment in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which forced some migrants to remain in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. Has this created an unprecedented surge of migrants at the southern border?
Many in the media appear convinced that there is now a "border crisis." At his first press conference last Thursday, Biden was asked ten questions about his immigration policy and none of COVID-19. A representative sample:
[D]o you bear responsibility for everything that’s happening at the border now? I hear you talking a lot about the past administration. You decided to roll back some of those policies; did you move too quickly to roll back [Trump's] policies?
The focus on the alleged "border crisis" during the press conference is reflected in overall media coverage. This chart, via MuckRack, measures the number of articles from major outlets which use the term "border crisis" each month. Use of the term exploded this month.
Republican officials like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) are doing their best to encourage this kind of coverage. Over the weekend, Cruz led a delegation of Republican senators "to see the ongoing crisis at the border firsthand in Mission, Texas." Cruz claimed the crisis was a "direct consequence of policy decisions by the Biden administration to stop building the wall, to return to ‘catch and release,' and to end the ‘Stay in Mexico' policy."
Cruz also released this hyperbolic video shot in the style of a wildlife documentary:
But Cruz's rhetoric and the recent spike in news coverage is not reflective of the reality at the southern border. The American Immigration Council produced this chart, which tracks apprehensions of individual adults, families, and unaccompanied minors over time.
The surge in the apprehension of single adults began in April 2020, when all of Trump's policies were still in place. That is "when President Trump instituted the practice of expelling all individuals encountered at the border under public health authority allegedly provided by Title 42 of the U.S. Code." The figures include "people trying to cross multiple times, as primarily Mexican men are turned back within hours, letting them try again quickly."
Despite Republican claims that Biden has embraced "open borders," the Biden administration has left Trump's policy of using Title 42 to immediately expel asylum seekers in place. Many groups who advocate for immigrant rights have harshly criticized Biden's policy. "The Biden administration’s use of Title 42 is flatly illegal. There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and Trump administration’s position," Lee Gelernt of the ACLU told the Los Angeles Times. Seeking asylum is not a crime — it's part of the nation's system of legal immigration.
There is a smaller surge in the apprehensions of families and unaccompanied children. But that surge started in November 2020, when a court ruled "a federal judge ruled that doing so is a violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act." After that order was lifted this year, Biden did not resume using Title 42 to expel unaccompanied children, but there was no change in policy. In February, the Biden administration stopped immediately deporting most families as well. The Biden administration says that "this is because the Mexican government in the state of Tamaulipas has refused to accept the expulsions of certain families with especially young children." But the overall number of apprehensions of families and unaccompanied children remains far below what it was in 2019.
The narrative is that major changes in border policy have created a massive surge in migration. The reality is that Biden has not changed the most salient policies and the surge, which is far from unprecedented, began many months before Biden took office.
The kidsThere are over 16,000 unaccompanied minors who were apprehended at the border who are currently in the custody of the United States government. This is a record. And many are living in poor conditions that are not suitable for children — or anyone.
March 22nd 2021
Why are so many kids coming to the border alone? There hasn't been a major policy shift from the Biden administration regarding these children. It could be a build-up from when the Trump administration was using Title 42 to immediately deport unaccompanied minors. Or there may be a perception that they will be treated more humanely by the Biden administration.
But children tend to migrate in waves and it's hard to figure out the reasons. A 2014 study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which attempted to ascertain the reasons for a previous surge, concluded that "child migrants’ motives for migrating to the United States are often multifaceted and difficult to measure analytically." Although "the impacts of actual and perceived U.S. immigration policies have been widely debated, it remains unclear if, and how, specific immigration policies have motivated children to migrate to the United States." The CRS suggested that misconceptions about United States policy may influence children as much as the policies themselves.
The Washington Post reports that "smugglers may have been exploiting potential clients by claiming it would be easier [for minors] to enter the United States once the Trump administration was gone."
If these surges of minors have been a persistent problem, why is the United States so unprepared to deal with them? Why are kids sleeping on thin mats strewn across concrete floors? In The Atlantic, Caitlin Dickerson writes that policymakers are worried that spending money on better treatment of migrants, even children, will cause encourage more people to migrate. "The issue is not that the federal government is unable to handle the large numbers of children crossing the border now—rather, that it has been unwilling to spend the money required to process children more safely and comfortably, because of a concern about optics," according to Dickerson.
It appears, however, that the Biden administration is taking steps to improve the situation. It has "launched an unprecedented effort to open more than 16,000 emergency beds for migrant children" in "nine emergency housing facilities." The new facilities will "get kids out of [Custom and Border Patrol]'s law enforcement facilities and into spaces staffed by child welfare professionals."
There are currently some eighteen thousand unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. custody, including more than five thousand who remain in holding cells, as the government scrambles to find space to house them. Republicans who were silent when Trump was separating migrant children from their parents and eviscerating the asylum system are now denouncing “Biden’s border crisis.” The messaging appears to be effective; it’s causing all sorts of confusion. Biden is turning away forty per cent of asylum-seeking families and virtually all single adults arriving at the border, under a controversial Trump policy known as Title 42, which he has left in place. Even so, everyone from TV news anchors to the President of Mexico is blaming Biden for encouraging more migrants to travel north, because he vowed to stop Trump’s heedless cruelty. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, tweeted that Biden has “emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status.” He meant it as a criticism.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has predicted that the United States will encounter more migrants by the end of 2021 than it has at any point in the past two decades. He has also, like the rest of the Administration, avoided labelling the situation a crisis. “This is not new,” he said. “We have experienced migration surges before.” What is new, though, is the pace: for most of March, about five hundred and fifty children have been arriving at the border every day. Both Mayorkas and Biden have gone on television to announce that the border is closed; at a White House press briefing, Roberta Jacobson, from the National Security Council, made the announcement in Spanish. But it was directed more at critics in Congress than at people in Honduras and Guatemala, the countries from which most of the families and children are coming.
The word “crisis” is both an overstatement and an understatement of the situation. There were more families and children seeking asylum at the border under Trump in 2019 than there are now. And the current numbers, if higher than Biden anticipated, are not unexpected. The pandemic has led to renewed desperation in Central America, as have two hurricanes that devastated the region last fall, displacing tens of thousands of people. Yet, in another sense, the situation is worse than much of the public understands, because the issues involved are genuinely complex and nearly impossible to settle as long as policymakers in Washington continue to regard decency as a sign of political weakness rather than of moral strength. ... "
A toddler’s muddy shoe.
An empty wallet.
A pink hairbrush.
A line of Scripture.
These and other possessions litter the dirt path leading uphill from the Rio Grande. Bright spots quickly coated with dust, they are what was carried and what was dropped by mothers, fathers and children, like the boy whose size 6 Batman underwear lay in a clearing beyond a thicket.
Birth certificates. Scribbled phone numbers. Prized belongings hauled for weeks over hundreds of miles. These, too, are scattered along the trail by migrants, their footsteps quiet in the night after they’ve crossed the river. But what shine most are the plastic wristbands — a rainbow of yellow, gray, red and blue spreading through the brush — some cinched to fit the smallest arms.
We spoke with migrants as they crossed the border with smugglers and turned themselves in
Mexican traffickers have been ferrying families and unaccompanied children, many from Central America, across the river on rafts and into Texas’ Rio Grande Valley this month. They affix the wristbands to migrants as proof of payment. The wristbands are migrants’ claves — their keys to safe passage — and those without them say they’ve been kidnapped by smugglers and held until relatives or friends agreed to pay their fee, at least $6,000.
State troopers who patrol the area with night vision goggles say a smuggler recently dropped a 2-year-old in the river to divert the troopers from seizing a raft. Earlier this month, a pregnant woman went into labor on the riverbank and lost her baby. More recently, about 200 miles upriver from Roma, a 9-year-old girl died while crossing the river with her Guatemalan mother and young brother."
