Is It Ever OK To ‘Cage’ Migrant Kids?

Why is it OK for President Biden to put “kids in cages” if it was so shameful when former President Trump did it?

RELATED: Biden Reopens Border Detention Centers He Called “Cages”

Of Course Not. Let's Talk About What Biden Is Doing

“Where is your outrage, shock, and horror of your buddy Biden keeping kids in cages?” asked a reader named Joseph Bacskay. “How about an article about that?”

Readers like Joseph have been inundating my mailbox with that question, which obviously deserves a straight answer. It’s never OK to cage kids.

Got it? Good. Now, let’s get something straight.

To Trump, they were a political football

Trump piled thousands of migrant kids in cages because he didn’t want them, yanked too many of them from their parents’ arms, deported the parents, and never reunited them.

To Trump, the children, their parents, and all the other asylum seekers were less than human. They didn’t deserve even a chance to make their case in a U.S. court. That’s why tens of thousands of asylum seekers got stuck waiting in Mexico.

President Joe Biden, on the other hand, believes America must remain a compassionate nation that never turns its back on the Central American children who risk a long, dangerous journey through Mexico for a shot at a better life – many for a shot at simply staying alive.

Why would I be furious with Biden for allowing the kids to be placed with sponsors, often their relatives, here in the United States?

Anyone with an ounce of humanity would be rushing to help the Biden administration handle the thousands of unaccompanied minors showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border instead of spewing venom and using them as a political football.

Border is not ‘wide open' to everyone

The Republicans waging an all-out war on migrant children know that turning our backs on them is un-American. These kids and their families are fleeing extreme poverty and crime-ridden Central American countries.

Thank goodness Biden is choosing to reinstate the American value that we are a nation of immigrants, not Trump’s Make America White Again movement that so many Republicans are still fostering.

“Our border is WIDE OPEN and the cartels are in FULL CONTROL,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives.

That’s a lie.

The U.S. border with Mexico is not “wide open” to everyone, as Republicans claim. It is open to unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers – some 25,000 whom Trump forced to wait in Mexico.

Most everyone else is being deported under a provision of the 1944 Public Health Act known as Title 42 that Trump invoked in March 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. That provision allowed the Trump and now the Biden administration to summarily expel everyone trying to enter the U.S. illegally without processing them.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 317,590 expulsions under the Title 42 provision from the beginning of the fiscal year in October 2020 through February 2021. Single adults and most families are being expelled, officials said.

House them? Or deport them alone?

Now, why is the Biden administration scrambling to handle the unaccompanied minors? Because there are so many of them.

So, yes. Facilities are crowded and officials are using every available resource such as convention centers and even hotels to house them temporarily.

But what’s the alternative?

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut put it best this week when he responded to the Republicans’ anti-migrant rhetoric.

“You support dumping these kids – these 10 and 11-year-olds – on the other side of the border, scared and alone, and just leave them to die or to be forced into the arms of drug cartels or traffickers in northern Mexico?” Murphy asked.

Well, yes. That, apparently, is exactly what Republicans would rather do.

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