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by Will Marshall, PPI President
In 1212 (CE), thousands of European children afire with religious zeal set off on foot to free Jerusalem from infidels. The ill-fated “Childrens’ Crusade” didn’t make it past Genoa and ended with many young marchers being sold into slavery.
What’s happening today on the U.S.-Mexico border isn’t as dramatic, but it’s bad enough. More than 14,000 unaccompanied teenagers and children, mostly from Central America, have trekked to the border in hopes of finding asylum in post-Trump America. U.S. officials are detaining them in overcrowded camps and makeshift shelters until they can be placed with relatives or other sponsors while their cases are decided.
While continuing to expel adults who cross the border illegally, the Biden administration in January announced that children would be admitted on humanitarian grounds. Ironically, that policy change has led to more “family separation,” only with the crucial difference that parents and relatives are making the wrenching decision to send their children to the border voluntarily, while they stay behind in Mexico.
Republicans, eager to divert attention from Biden’s hugely popular Covid relief bill, have pounced. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently decried the “Biden border crisis,” adding, “It’s more than a crisis; it’s a human heartbreak.”
Now that’s rich. What is happening on the border is heartrending. But where were the passionate outcries from McCarthy and his colleagues over the past four years, as Donald Trump and Steven Miller were forcibly separating migrant children from their parents, slamming the door on refugees, defaming immigrants as potential terrorists, rapists and drug dealers, and otherwise making cruelty the hallmark of U.S. immigration policy?
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