Did I say “convention center”? I meant “decompression center.” That’s the latest euphemism the White House has rolled out for its border policies according to the AP, reminiscent of how detention facilities have now been converted into, ahem, “processing hubs” for new arrivals.
So many kids are crossing the border every day that the White House keeps having to scale up in finding creative solutions to house them. The first solution was to make an exception to COVID rules at HHS shelters by moving them from half capacity to full capacity. Then they started talking about putting some kids up in hotels or at military bases. But the numbers keep surging so now they’re forced to think big: The Dallas convention center is being tapped to warehouse as many as 3,000 teenagers over the next 90 days as the Border Patrol tries to cope with all of the children who are surrendering to them and requesting asylum.
I wonder how long it’ll be before the feds bring other convention centers online too. One just isn’t going to hack it based on the latest numbers:
As of Sunday morning, U.S. Border Patrol was holding more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in short-term holding facilities, including jail-like stations unfit to house minors, according to government records reviewed by CBS News.
Nearly 3,000 of the unaccompanied children in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody had been held longer than 72 hours…
The number of unaccompanied children in CBP custody on Sunday represents a 31% increase from early last week, when the agency was holding more than 3,200 minors. The number of children held longer than three days more than doubled.
On average CBP took 565 kids into custody every day last week, a moment when we’re still a month or two away from the “spring surge” that’s expected. Even with the entire immigration system scrambling to find places for children to stay until they can be handed off to a sponsor in the U.S., even with FEMA now pitching in to ease the strain, the Border Patrol has no recourse but to house more and more of them in their own detention facilities — sorry, processing hubs — at the border.
Those are the same facilities the media described as “cages” during the Trump era, Jim Geraghty reminds us. The optics are so bad for Team Joe that allegedly lawyers aren’t being allowed in to inspect the conditions firsthand. (“It is pretty surprising that the administration talks about the importance of transparency and then won’t let the attorneys for children set eyes on where they’re staying,” said one attorney.) From a CBS report on the Donna, Texas, detention center:
“Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” Desai added, citing interviews with nearly a dozen unaccompanied migrant children held at the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in Donna, Texas.
On March 2, the Donna complex was holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to an internal CBP document reviewed by CBS News.
Most of the minors said they had only showered once while in U.S. custody, even though they’d been held for more than five days, according to Desai. Some said they had showered twice.
Younger kids are more resistant to COVID than adults are but teenagers are susceptible to infection, especially when they’re packed in cheek by jowl. Imagine the outbreaks that’ll be seeded by Biden’s “come one, come all” policy for children.
The explanations being given by Team Joe for the recent surge don’t wash, Geraghty notes. The hurricanes that ravaged Central America, allegedly inspiring the current exodus, happened six months ago. The pandemic has taken a bite out of those countries’ economies too, but that didn’t start recently. If an economic downturn is driving this, we should have expected them months ago. The key variable that’s changed, obviously, is Biden’s decision to reverse Trump’s policy ordering minors to be turned away at the border under pandemic regulations limiting entry to the U.S. Word has gotten out internationally that we’ve replaced detention facilities with “decompression centers,” so much so that adults are coming to the border too and finding themselves chagrined when they realize there’s a wait for them to get in:
Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed in a seat as Mr. Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.
“I did not make it,” she sobbed into the phone as she spoke with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.
“Biden promised us!” wailed another woman.
Many of the migrants said they had spent their life savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers — who had falsely promised them that the border was open after President Biden’s election.
“Biden promised us.” That’s why they’re coming. And even if they can’t point to a specific promise by Biden allowing anyone entry at any time, they know that the politics of the moment guarantees that the American left will continue to agitate on their behalf in lobbying the president for more lenient treatment. It can’t be long now before we get some new photos of AOC looking anguished outside the fence of a detention center “caging” kids to put pressure on the administration to expand catch-and-release. That’s why Kevin McCarthy was at the border today — not just to keep up the counterpressure from the right but because he believes, correctly, that Biden opening up the country to any unaccompanied kid from south of the border who wants to come is a policy for which voters’ patience will be limited. Here he is speaking during his tour today.
