Rise in Migrant Children Tests Biden Border Strategy

Actually, China Joe doesn't have a "border strategy." He has an anti-Trump strategy, by which he seeks to literally undo any and every policy the former president implemented or pursued, and damned be the consequences.

On the migrant issue, Biden's now taking things even further than Barack Obama. Democrats in general do not want any borders --- or any border controls --- because everyone knows that the Dems can't win without "undocumented" voters, and don't even get me going about criminal aliens who commit heinous crimes, only to be released under the new administration's policies. 

Democrats are lawless and intentionally oblivious to the concerns of everyday Americans, as my posts here recently have pointed out.

At WSJ, "Administration seeks to avoid new crisis as child shelters near capacity":

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is looking for ways to stave off a fresh humanitarian crisis at the southern border as the number of unaccompanied children arriving to seek asylum is beginning to rise again, this time amid a global pandemic, according to government officials and others familiar with the conversations.

Children have been crossing the border illegally in increasing numbers for the past few months after a lull, when the start of the pandemic and lockdowns across Latin America last spring briefly brought border crossings to historic lows. In January, 5,707 children arrived at the border alone, up from 4,855 the month before.

The numbers are smaller than in 2018 and 2019, when waves of children and families overwhelmed border-patrol stations and migrant shelters.

But this time, government capacity is limited: The child-shelter network run by the Department of Health and Human Services to house migrant children has reduced its capacity by 40%, and as of Friday, shelters were 93% full.

“They’ve seen very large growth in a very short period of time,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, who oversaw the shelter network during the Obama administration. “The closer you get to 100% capacity, the harder the system is to manage.”

On Monday, the government plans to reopen an emergency shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas—a converted encampment that once hosted oil-field workers—to house 700 additional children. That facility, which opened in 2019 to manage the surge of children, and other emergency shelters had come under criticism from Democrats, in part because they didn’t follow standards governing care at permanent government shelters.

Unaccompanied children enjoy unique protections under immigration law that forbid the government from quickly deporting them. They are required to be sent to HHS shelters, where the government cares for them until they can find a suitable sponsor, typically a family member or family friend living in the U.S.

The risk, when HHS shelters get full, is that children get backed up in border-patrol stations, where they are housed in stark cells—with just a bench and a toilet—that are designed to hold single adults for a few hours rather than children for days.

As of Friday, more than 700 children were in Border Patrol custody, up from 150 on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the numbers.

“A jail cell is no place for a child, even for the shortest possible duration,” said Andrew Meehan, who served as the spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the border patrol’s parent agency, during the 2019 crisis.

The increase has several likely causes, U.S. and international officials say. Sagging economies and gang violence in Central America, exacerbated by the pandemic and a pair of hurricanes last year that hit the region, have continued to push migrants to flee.

“If we were not in the middle of a pandemic, we wouldn’t be facing the situation that we are in right now,” said an HHS official.

Human smugglers working in the region have also been telling would-be migrants to attempt the journey now, saying the new administration would prove more lenient than its predecessor...

Oh, yes, those "human smugglers" who China Joe and his far-left minions care about not one whit. And who is most hurt? Children, of course, because as any human trafficker knows, the Democrats are soft on border control, and traffickers can literally "make a killing" with their human prey.

This should make any person, and decent and thoughtful person, angry as hell.

Still more.