As Biden enjoyed another family weekend getaway to Delaware, FEMA was deployed to the southern border to manage an unfettered immigration crisis.
As President Joe Biden enjoyed his third “less confining, more relaxing weekend hangout” in Delaware since taking office, his DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deployed FEMA to the southern border for 90 days to help manage the critical numbers of unaccompanied minors entering the country and landing in crude border detention facilities for time periods beyond the legal limit.
CNN reported Saturday that children held in a detention facility in Donna, Texas, lacked showers, phone calls to family, and sunlight.
“Donna is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis,” a spokesperson from the National Center for Youth Law told CNN. “We understand the administration inherited this disaster, but I cannot stress enough how urgent the situation is with the growing number of young unaccompanied children. We spoke to numerous distraught children who don’t understand why they can’t talk to their parents, see their siblings at Donna, or get some fresh air.”
The influx on Biden’s watch has been critical: In 2020, CBP data records 33,239 enforcement encounters with unaccompanied minors for the entire fiscal year, while there have already been 29,729 encounters in FY 2021. The Biden White House has claimed that the perilous situation is a consequence of the past administration’s “cruelty,” but they’re also scrambling to correct the notion that the U.S. border is “open” after Biden campaigned on welcoming immigrants into our communities, ending prolonged detention, and more.
NPR reported Thursday:
Without additional shelter space in the government network, immigrant minors will be forced to spend more time in the crude Border Patrol holding cells that were built for adults. Detainees sleep on the floor under thin, silvery blankets, receive rudimentary meals and complain it’s so cold in the cells that they’re nicknamed hieleras, or freezers. These are the same holding cells that were branded as “kennels” during a surge of Central American families in the Trump years.
Blame it on our good intentions, the White House says.
“Surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent-up demand,” Ambassador Roberta Jacobson said in the briefing room Wednesday. “I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision.”
