A new year, a new president, the return of an old problem: unaccompanied children crossing the border en masse.
Thousands of children (usually teenagers over the age of 16 or 17, but Border Patrol agents report an increasing number of children under the age of 13) arrive each month from Central America.
On Thursday, a Customs and Border Protection official reportedly told top Biden administration officials to expect a maximum of 13,000 unaccompanied minors to cross the border in May, the highest level in history.
“We are seeing the highest numbers in February [that] we have never seen in the history of the [Unaccompanied Alien Child] program, ”an official from the Department of Health and Human Services told Axios.
It is true: a crisis worse than the one that provoked the reaction of the “children in cages” under President Donald Trump and the previous crises that provoked the construction of these “cages” under President Barack Obama.
And it is a crisis that we and others warn would come, as soon as President Biden began to reverse all of Trump’s border policies, even those that were clearly responsible for producing historic lows on illegal cruises and of returning to Obama’s policies that triggered the unprecedented waves of children crossing. without family.
Now Biden has to reopen shelters to house children until the feds can figure out what to do with them, shelters their regular allies denounced as horrors in the Trump years. Still, says Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, “there are very few good options here and we chose the one we thought was the best.”
That’s just because their boss already turned down the option of trying to make sure they didn’t come here in the first place.