Milbank: Yes, border is in crisis, and Trump's making it worse
I’ll admit it: President Trump is right. There’s a crisis on the southern border.
The existence of the crisis is as obvious as its cause: Trump. He didn’t single-handedly create this mess, but he definitely made it worse.
He pursued not a policy but an instinct, following emotion rather than empiricism. Now, an immigration policy of toughness and fear has backfired in tangible ways.
Customs and Border Protection reported on Tuesday that 103,492 migrants were either apprehended or turned away along the southern border in March (with about 90 percent attempting to cross illegally), the largest number in 12 years and more than quadruple the 23,557 in Trump’s first full month as president, and double the level seen early last fall. The open-border, catch-and-release, amnesty-loving, no-enforcement Obama administration never did this poorly.
Fully 60 percent of those apprehended are families or unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, part of a more than 370 percent increase in families trying to enter the country over the past six months. Customs and Border Protection can’t keep up with this growing humanitarian disaster.
The underlying source of the migration — violence in Central America — wasn’t Trump’s doing. But he compounded the trouble. The bellicose talk of wall-building and a zero-tolerance crackdown gave migrants an incentive to hurry to the United States. The 2018 campaign hysteria about caravans and the country’s limited ability to stop them, meant to frighten Americans, served as an advertisement for asylum for would-be migrants. The Border Patrol found only 13 groups of 100 or more in fiscal 2018; over the past six months, since Trump drew attention to the caravans, border agents have encountered 104.
The attempt to crack down on asylum, including holding applicants in Mexico, encouraged more migrants to attempt illegal crossings. The profusion of enforcement crackdowns — including the administration’s half-baked family separation policy — strained and distracted personnel. The government shutdown and unstable management (continuing this week with the purge of top officials at the Department of Homeland Security) slowed the government’s response to the migration surge. The president’s recent decision to end anti-violence and anti-poverty assistance to three Central American countries will worsen the root cause of migration.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/milbank-yes-border-is-in-crisis-and-trumps-making-it-worse/
= new reply since forum marked as read
