The stories coming back of overcrowding and lack of sanitary facilities or running water at the places where immigration officials detain migrants from Central America have unsettled many Americans — but one thing missing, until Sen Tim Kaine’s visit last week, was anything terribly specific about fixing the problem.
Kaine and Sen Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii (the only U.S. Senator who was a child immigrant to the United States when her mother, like many of the Central Americans detained at the border, was fleeing domestic violence), took time to talk to Customs and Border Protection officials — on and off the record — as well as other agencies responsible for migrants after their arrest and initial processing.
Listening, they heard some striking things. First, that when those detention centers started overflowing with people, Customs and Border patrol officers often couldn’t get Immigration and Customs bureau staff to pick up the phone to hear about their responsibility to house adults languishing in CBP’s short term holding cells. Same thing with Health and Human Services department officials responsible for the kids.
Making sure those agencies are interacting the way they’re supposed to is a critical, immediate step, Kaine said.
And Kaine said CBP officers, especially when they get a chance to talk without their bosses listening in, had plenty of ideas about other immediate steps that could ease some of the worst conditions on the border — one, for instance, was that recognizing that some of the children crossing the border do so with extended family members, but that the Trump Administration’s definition of a family that can’t be split up to separate the kids is limited to children who are with their parents or legal guardians.
Tearing up the system — for instance, by abolishing ICE, as some politicians and activists urge — won’t bring the kind of change that’s really needed on the border, as long as the Trump Administration’s current cpolicies remain in place, Kaine said. Bad policy means bad results, no matter what you call the agency that enforces it, he added.
When visiting the main El Paso center where CBP officers first hold migrants, and the holding facility in nearby Clint, Tex, where as many as 700 people were held in a facility meant for 100, leaving kids to be housed in unairconditioned garages without running water, Kaine made a point of talking to families who trekked up to the United States from Central America.
Some had been in the U.S. for barely two hours. They told him about what drove them to make long journey, talked about the violence, drugs, domestic abuse that would lead a parent to walk, hand in hand with a four, six or seven year old, the thousands of miles to the United States.
And one thing struck him hard, as he reflected over the weekend on what he heard.
“These families, they believe in the American dream even more than many of us do … as brand-newcomers, two hours here, they were patriotic in their belief that the American dream is still a reality,” he said.
