The Kids Were Safer ‘in Cages’
by Abe Greenwald
Joe Biden has long touted his approach to the U.S. southern border as more humane than Donald Trump’s. And by 2020, nothing had become more emblematic of the Trump administration’s perceived heartlessness on the issue than migrant “kids in cages” at Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detention facilities. (Never mind for now that the cages were chain-link partitions first built and used by the Obama administration.) Candidate Biden told lawmakers that, if elected, he wouldn’t detain children at the border. And when Biden became president, he did in fact move swiftly to empty these centers detained children.
The results are a Dickensian nightmare.
“Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” writes the New York Times’ Hannah Dreier in a piece of deep-dive journalism that should earn her a second Pulitzer Prize. “This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” she writes. “Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”
https://www.commentary.org/abe-greenwald/the-kids-were-safer-in-cages/
