The Largest Immigration Surge the U.S. Has Seen In 20 Years

ELIZABETH NEUMANN, FORMER U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY ASSISTANT SECRETARY: It is a desperate situation. And I think that, unfortunately, it gets overly politicized by fringe elements on either side of the political spectrum. But the first and foremost responsibility — I mean, these are kids, right? Like, these are kids that, by definition, are not accompanied by a parent or family member. They are very vulnerable. And the first priority has to be their security and then their well-being. The process that the U.S. government has set up, usually, the children are apprehended by the Border Patrol. The standard is that they should not stay in a Border Patrol facility for longer than 72 hours, because those facilities were not designed for children. They were primarily built to handle the detention of adults. And kids, as you know, need a different type of care. And there’s also a problem of scale or volume. We have so many that it’s overrunning the Border Patrol stations. So what you see the Biden administration doing is rapidly standing up influx centers. They’re leveraging FEMA, who’s very good at doing logistics in an emergency situation. I don’t think anybody believes that this is the long-term solution. We are dealing with both a seasonal migration pattern. We have always seen an influx this time of year .You’re dealing with pent-up demand from the pandemic. The cartels have basically sent the signal that, hey, the pandemic is starting to wane, so the borders are reopening. So that’s — there’s a demand signal there, and people think it’s safe to come up. And that’s increasing the volume. You also had two major hurricanes in Honduras this last year. So there’s other push factors at play that are driving people towards the border. So we have to not only triage the current moment, and I think the Biden administration is doing a good job with that. But we really have to start addressing both the medium- and long-term issues at hand in order to eventually get to a place where this is not happening anymore. And that really requires Congress to act. We have spent over 15 years as an executive branch — 15 years of executive branch attempts to try to address this problem. Republican and Democrat administrations have tried to solve this from their set of authorities that they currently have. It’s not working. About the only other thing that we haven’t been able to do is have Congress act and change some of the laws, address some of these root causes that are driving people from the Central American countries and pulling people into the United States. We have to address those root causes. But that is a really tough order, when the Congress has not seemed to be able to do anything with compromise or bipartisanship. It really is going to require some rational, smart thinking and a commitment to actually doing something about the problem, instead of using it for your political aims.