The surge of desperate young migrants across the southwest border has the Obama administration scrambling to respond. It was clearly ill-prepared for a problem that grew steadily for years before exploding this year, with more than 47,000 unaccompanied children caught at the border since October.
It is past time for excuses, and too soon for the post-mortem. The administration needs to mount a sustained surge of its own, of humanitarian care, shelter and legal assistance for children who have faced horrific traumas in fleeing violence in their home countries, mainly Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. As Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. meets this week with officials in those countries, they should all commit to making it safe for would-be migrants to stay home, by reducing the murders and gang crimes that feed the exodus. Congress should meanwhile approve the administration’s $1.4 billion request to handle the emergency on this side of the border, though more will surely be needed to assure health, safety and due process for these young migrants.
The administration’s job has been made harder by an atmosphere of histrionics and wild accusation, as Republican officials, far more interested in blame than solutions, have spent weeks braying about a besieged border and laying the crisis entirely at President Obama’s feet. More justified, and vexing, are the complaints from those witnessing the chaos close-up.
State officials in Arizona were furious that immigration officials, apparently without better ideas, had dumped hundreds of migrants at a bus station in Phoenix, with no resources, to find their way. Civil-liberties groups have reported that children have told of being beaten, harassed, threatened and sexually abused in detention. Some children, interviewed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and National Immigrant Justice Center, said they had no food or medical care and had been held in icebox-cold cells — nicknamed hieleras, Spanish for freezers. The administration, which has been racing to set up emergency shelters on military bases in California, Texas and Oklahoma and a converted warehouse in Arizona, needs to investigate and immediately correct conditions that threaten any child’s safety and health.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for taking custody of the unaccompanied Central American children, badly needs to increase its ability to shelter thousands properly as they wait to reunite with their parents and be seen in immigration courts.
The good news is that the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, and the head of the Border Patrol, Gil Kerlikowske, who took office promising more openness and accountability, have ordered an inquiry into the reported abuse. The administration has also started a program to provide about 100 lawyers and paralegals for unaccompanied minors.
That is a welcome response, but it needs to be bigger. The Dickensian absurdity often seen in immigration courts — little children propped up before judges and government lawyers with no idea of what is going on — must not be tolerated. Concerns about the cost of providing lawyers should by eased by a recent study from the New York City Bar Association showing that free legal representation for indigent migrants pays for itself, mainly by reducing the costs of unnecessary detention.
Despite what Republicans are saying, there are reasonable responses to the crisis at the border. None requires ignoring the law or granting mass amnesty to migrants who may have no legal claim to entering the United States. (Though many surely do, as refugees.) Nor is it necessary to pile on more harsh and panicked border enforcement, or abandon the administration’s promise to enforce deportations more humanely, with a priority on criminals, not minor offenders. The administration needs to keep its eye on the larger goal: a more rational, lawful immigration system. Nothing about the current crisis changes that.
It’s infuriating to see the long-term reform that would ease the problem — by opening more routes to legal immigration, and restoring mobility to a population trapped on this side of the border — being sent to its doom by the short-term political scheming of Congress’s hard-core anti-immigrant, anti-Obama caucus. nytimes.com
