Weeks into the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, Latino immigrants coming to the US are creating a humanitarian challenge and a political controversy. Unaccompanied minors have arrived at the southern border in record numbers, as many as 550 per day, forcing the administration to construct new facilities to house them.
Biden campaigned against former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, but he is struggling to devise more humane policies while still coping with the Covid pandemic.
The result has been Biden’s first political crisis: At his first press conference as president last week, more than half the questions focused on immigrants. This past weekend, groups of Congress people from both parties visited the border and held duelling press conferences that offered conflicting appraisals of the situation.
“President Biden has inherited a chaotic border situation created by a decade of Congressional failures, four years of a President who coldly used the border as an instrument of political and ethnic division, and a long history of exploitation and economic deterioration in Central America,” San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy told the Tablet.
“It is President Biden’s responsibility to create and implement a system of fairness and order for those seeking refuge in our country, but this project will fail if the humanity and suffering of those at our gates is not the primary element propelling us at every stage.” McElroy’s diocese includes the entire 227 km-border between California and Mexico.
Many of the migrants now coming to the US had been staying in refugee camps across the border, as a result of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. Biden revoked that policy but his administration continues deporting some people, though not unaccompanied minors, who seek asylum.
“President George W Bush signed a bipartisan law to ensure the due process rights of unaccompanied minors at the border and protect them from human trafficking,” explained Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute which advocates for migrants. “Nevertheless, in the closing months of his administration, Trump illegally expelled tens of thousands of unaccompanied youth and children. The Trump administration deliberately left President Biden a hollowed-out system, the effects of which we are now witnessing in the present hurried attempt to honour obligations to receive children with a measure of humanity.”
Catholic leaders are disinclined to ignore Biden’s missteps. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, after visiting a refugee camp in Mexico, tweeted, “What I witnessed today in Juarez [Mexico] were the families who had fled life-threatening situations in their home countries and who crossed our border seeking asylum, only to be flown from south Texas to El Paso and heartlessly pushed across the border with nothing – only their tears.”
Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) asked all of its members agencies to deploy staff in-person and remotely to help cope with the surge. “This is a matter of our faith and a mandate of the Gospel: to welcome the stranger and to care for those who are bereft,” said Sister Donna Markham, President of CCUSA. In addition to the agencies operating welcome shelters along the border, CCUSA is working with government operated youth shelters in other cities such as Dallas, providing case management, spiritual and pastoral services, coordinating travel, and other humanitarian assistance.
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