As Dallas awaits arrival of migrant teens, Gov. Abbott accuses President Biden of ‘opening floodgates’ to migrants
By Dianne Solis
The Dallas Morning News
March 17, 2021
Gov. Greg Abbott traveled to Dallas on Wednesday to assert that President Joe Biden is “enticing” immigrant children to the U.S., and he said he would investigate whether or not the immigrants are subject to human trafficking.
Against the backdrop of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, where as many as 200 immigrant teenagers were to arrive Wednesday as a temporary shelter opened, Abbott said the border is in crisis as he again lashed out at the Biden administration, blaming a sharp increase in the number of migrants crossing the border on his policies.
“I urge President Biden: Do not traumatize these children by enticing them to make this trek,” said the Republican governor. “The Biden administration opened the floodgates. ... They were completely unprepared for this.”
Republicans and others have criticized the Biden administration for what they call confusing “Now is not the time” messaging that leads would-be immigrants to believe a time will come when passage across the border will be possible.
The Dallas convention center will eventually house as many as 3,000 boys ages 15 to 17 over a 90-day period. They are legally seeking asylum in the country and after processing will either go stay with relatives in the U.S. or enter long-term federal care. The convention center housing — called a “decompression center” by federal officials — is one of several opened up to ease overcrowding in Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley.
Preparations for the arrival of the teens, who are believed to be mostly Central American, began this week, and on Wednesday American Red Cross workers could be seen at the convention center.
A federal anti-trafficking law provides unaccompanied migrant minors with special protections and assessments and requires that the child be transferred within a 72-hour period from U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for care and further screening.
Abbott said he wants the Biden administration to grant access to the migrant teens to discuss human trafficking issues with his team, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, whose chief joined him at the news conference.
Human trafficking is a different and more serious legal charge than human smuggling. Many immigrants use smugglers, or coyotes, to assist them through Mexico.
Abbott charged that the Biden administration was “enticing” unaccompanied migrant children to begin the journey north that exposed them to “traffickers, to abuse and to terror.”
“America needs to know how these children — some are young children — are coming across the border and who is helping them come across the border,” Abbott said.
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment about Abbott’s remarks.
HHS is trying to ramp up bed space in its licensed shelters, and that’s made temporary facilities like the convention center necessary.
On Wednesday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said children shouldn’t be politicized. In a detailed statement, Jenkins said the federal government leased the convention center for a “humanitarian operation.” Jenkins championed helping unaccompanied migrant children in 2014 by offering temporary housing during a previous spike in arrivals.
“There will be some limited opportunities for volunteerism, ministry and donation but not at a cost to local taxpayers,” Jenkins said. “The children are unaccompanied minors, ages 15 to 17, who were being kept in small holding cells at the border not designed to incarcerate people for more than a few hours. ... The transfer to a temporary facility at the convention center will provide opportunities for exercise and socialization for children who have already faced incredible trauma.”
State Democrats took even sharper aim at the Republican governor, saying he is trying to distract the public from the state’s power grid failure after an epic February freeze and the state’s slower rollout of vaccinations against COVID-19.
“He manufactures fear of mainly Latino kids,” said State Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas. “He knows the danger of this irresponsible language because we lived it firsthand when El Paso families were gunned down because they were Hispanic.”
A statement from Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said, in part, “Immigration politics and policies are for Congress and the president to sort out. ... The city manager made the decision to move forward, but this is entirely a federal operation that does not involve the use of city of Dallas personnel.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pushed back on the use of the word “crisis” to describe the rising number of immigrants arriving at the border during a House committee hearing Wednesday morning.
“A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a 9-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration,” Mayorkas said. Family separation in 2018 was one of the responses by the Trump administration to rising migration, until a global outcry and litigation stopped it.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, called Abbott’s “newfound concern” for migrant children surprising. “Children arriving alone at the border are incredibly vulnerable, deserve to be welcomed with dignity and quickly united with their family members in the United States as their legal case for asylum is adjudicated,” Castro said in an email. “That’s what FEMA, the Red Cross and HHS are working to achieve, including at the Dallas convention center site by providing urgently needed services under federal law.”
Numbers
The Biden administration calls the rising number of immigrants at the border a challenge rather than a crisis. But Tuesday, Mayorkas did say the migration spike at the border is on pace to be the biggest “in the last 20 years.”
Most migrants are still quickly being expelled under Title 42, a public health measure that allows them to be almost immediately ejected at the border during the coronavirus pandemic. But with past successful litigation by the ACLU and others, the administration has let in unaccompanied minors who arrive at the border, and facilities for processing the children have quickly become overtaxed, in part because of Trump-era policy shifts and in part because of pandemic-related attempts to preserve social distancing.
In February, the U.S. Border Patrol detained about 9,500 immigrant minors travelling without a parent. The record high was in May 2019, when nearly 12,000 minors were detained.
That year, a total of 850,000 people were apprehended by the Border Patrol. It was still half the record high of fiscal year 2000.
But the flow of youths has set off alarms. One newly arrived child was 6 years old.
1 comment:
The guy behind Governor Abbott in the black suit wearing the 5X Beaver Stetson Cowboy Hat used to work as a Galveston Police Officer. He's a friend of mine. He went to work as a State Trooper and is now a Texas Ranger. If he scored the Governors Protection Detail he may milk it until Abbott is gone.
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