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According to the lawyers, many of the kids have to sleep on concrete floors. They don't get proper supervision. Nor do they routinely shower or brush their teeth. Details about how an outbreak of lice was handled inadequately are hard to read.
Assuming the account is accurate, one wonders how we could treat anyone this way, let alone children? But a lawyer who talked to The New Yorker mentioned a telling fact: The facility previously had a capacity of 104 and had never held children before. Yet now it held roughly 350 children, apparently accommodated by a new warehouse.
All this is consistent with vast numbers of migrants, many of them families and children, flooding the border and overtaxing facilities never meant for these kind of numbers or this demographic.
Indeed, the immigration lawyer mentioned to The New Yorker that the personnel at the Border Patrol facility were constantly receiving children and constantly transferring them over to a Health and Human Services site, and stipulated that the guards believe the children don't belong there. (After the public reports, they were moved.)
The broader problem is that HHS, which is supposed to get custody of migrant children from Border Patrol in short order, is itself overburdened and backed up. So, kids end up spending an inordinate amount of time with Border Patrol at sites no one ever intended for this purpose.
Since it's 2019, what should be properly attributed to dire circumstances and limited capacity is instead taken as evidence of President Trump's malice.
If what's happening at the border is a product of Trump policy, it would involve an intricate and well-executed plan. The White House would have to convince the acting head of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, who served as deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Enforcement under President Barack Obama, to send word down through a bureaucracy to treat children as callously as possible. And, oh yeah, word of this explosive guidance would have to remain strictly secret in a flagrantly leak-prone administration.
In the real world, a migrant influx will test even an administration more favorably inclined toward immigration. The reason the Left can't keep their viral images straight — often misattributing to Trump photos of kids in steel-cage holding pens during the Obama years — is that this is a similar crisis to the one Obama faced in his second term, with similar challenges.
A viral video of a Justice Department lawyer arguing before a panel of judges last week that kids don't need toothbrushes and soap to meet the standard for "safe and sanitaryā€¯ detention under the so-called Flores settlement has caused outrage.
But few have stopped to note that the underlying case had to do with a district court finding that the Obama administration in 2015 was in material breach of the Flores standard (or that the DOJ lawyer was offering a technical legal argument — not a defense of mistreating kids).
All that said, once these migrants are under our care, it is our responsibility to make sure they are treated as humanely as possible. The border needs more resources. The Trump administration has been asking Congress to pass a funding package, and it should do so forthwith.
To address the root cause of the crisis, it should also change the bizarre asylum rules that have forced us to release family units from Central America into the country, creating an incentive for more to come.
As long as that's the case, we aren't going to be able to control the border or process people coming across it in an orderly fashion. What we're seeing is what a border crisis looks like. If we don't like it — and we shouldn't — it's time for Congress to act to bring it to an end.
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