A new year, a new president, a return to an old problem: unaccompanied children crossing the border en masse.
Thousands of children – usually older teenagers, aged 16 or 17, but Border Patrol agents report an increasing number of children under the age of 13 – are arriving every month from Central America.
On Thursday, a Customs and Border Protection official told Biden government officials that they expected a peak of 13,000 unaccompanied minors to cross the border in May – the highest level ever.
“We are seeing the highest numbers for February [that] that we’ve seen in the history of [Unaccompanied Alien Child] program, ”an official from the Department of Health and Human Services told Axios.
That’s right: a crisis worse than the one that brought the reaction of the “boys in cages” under President Donald Trump, and the previous crises that led to the construction of these “cages” under President Barack Obama.
And it is a crisis that we and others have warned would come, as soon as President Biden began to reverse all Trump’s border policies, even those clearly responsible for producing historic casualties on illegal cruisers, and returning to the policies of Obama who first unleashed the unprecedented waves of children crossing without a family.
Now Biden is having to reopen shelters to house the children until the feds can figure out what to do with them – shelters that his usual allies denounced as horrors in the Trump years. Still, says White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “there are very few good options here, and we chose the one we think is the best.”
That’s just because your boss has already rejected the option of trying to make sure they don’t come here in the first place.