Kids Are Flooding The Border Again, But Beto O’Rourke Is Nowhere To Be Found
Other than interdicting the flow of children entering the country illegally, solutions to this crisis are hard to come by.
By Steven Wagner
March 19, 2021
Where is Robert Francis O’Rourke today? In June 2018, while running unsuccessfully for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat in Texas, he was outside the gates of the Tornillo facility for unaccompanied alien children (UACs), megaphone in hand.
UACs are children who cross the U.S. border illegally and without a parent. There was nothing for O’Rourke to protest about the children’s treatment. Rather, he was protesting the Trump administration for enforcing immigration laws as passed by Congress.
Today the Biden administration is activating an identical facility at Carizzo Springs, Texas, for the same purpose. But no Beto, no American Civil Liberties Union, no parade of members of Congress who pilgrimaged to Tornillo. It’s as if child welfare is not their primary concern.
The surge of juveniles crossing the border since Joe Biden’s inauguration has overwhelmed the shelter program run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instituted to care for them while appropriate guardians are found in the United States. There are a reported 8,000 in custody—one media report puts the number at 13,000.
Many are being warehoused at Federal Emergency Management Agency “decompression†facilities or, even less ideally, in U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations pending assignment of a shelter bed. During the Trump administration, a peak of 15,000 children were in custody, and very rarely was any child not in the care of HHS within the requisite 72 hours.
The coincidence of this surge in illegal border crossings with Biden’s inauguration is hard to dismiss as incidental. A wave of children (and adults) has crashed against the United States’ southern border, apparently sensing a new lack of resolve among immigration policy-makers to enforce existing laws.
more
https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/19/kids-are-flooding-the-border-again-but-beto-orourke-is-nowhere-to-be-found/
