A new year, a new president, a return of an old problem: unaccompanied children crossing borders en masse.
Thousands of children – mostly older teens, 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 officer reportedly told top officials from the Biden administration that he expected a peak of 13,000 unaccompanied minors to cross the border in May – the highest level ever.
‘We see the highest figures for February [that] we have ever seen in the history of the [Unaccompanied Alien Child] program, ”an official from the Ministry of Health and Human Services told Axios.
That’s right: a crisis worse than the one that sparked the “kids in cages” backlash under President Donald Trump, and the earlier crises that gave rise to the building of those “cages” under President Barack Obama.
And it’s a crisis that we and others have warned would come once President Biden began to reverse every Trump border policy, even those who were clearly responsible for producing historic lows at illegal crossings, and went back to the policies of Obama that first caused the unprecedented waves of crossing children. without family.
Now Biden must reopen shelters to house the kids until the FBI can figure out what to do with them – shelters that his usual allies in the Trump years labeled as horrific. But, says White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “There are very few good options here, and we chose the one we thought was the best.”
That’s only because her boss has already turned down the option to make sure she doesn’t come here at all.