Record 3,200 Migrant Children Stuck in Border Patrol Custody, Past Legal Limit | Hacker News Reader

Record 3,200 Migrant Children Stuck in Border Patrol Custody, Past Legal Limit

cbsnews.com

50 pointsdisgrunt39 comments

The only sensible policy is stop accepting anyone, and fund agencies in Mexico to return children to countries they are coming from. Plus good policies in those countries to build them up.

If we continue to keep accepting people who cross the border, they will keep coming. We are encouraging parents to send their kids up here. Even worse during a pandemic.

Surely the simpler solution is to stop putting humans in cages. It's not clear that it benefits anyone anywhere.

How could they not have thought about what to do once they passed the “legal limit”?

The government will surely fine themselves and learn their lesson. /s

Considering it went from 9 to 3,200 in less than a month, wouldn't a better question be what caused this sudden spike?

Apparently the U.S. detained 100,000 migrants on the Mexican border in February alone. [0]

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-border-id...

100,000 sounds like an invasion army. No wonder it has a lot of people upset for various reasons.

Comparing a bunch of kids to an invading army is stupid

Sounds like a humanitarian disaster to me.

100,000 isn’t a “bunch of kids” it’s a small town

Dismissing a 100,000 foreign individuals crossing your border as "a bunch of kids" is even more disingenuous and further fuels the issues the anti-immigration folk have. 100,000 is not peanuts. As the other commenter mentioned, that's a bigger than probably hundreds of towns in the USA.

Anywho, if we really "cared" about all the "bunch of kids" suffering in Mexico, we would have invaded Mexico and installed a "democratic" government years ago.

If you look into the full numbers there were massively more deportations under the obama/biden administration than under the trump administration. So my assumption(which could be incorrect) is that this is just business as usual.

Now, I'm not sure about the total apprehension numbers as the above mentioned stat could be gamed by holding people instead of deporting them. When I was looking into this I couldn't find those (apprehension) numbers by year anywhere.

If somebody has an informative link, I'm curious why this is still an issue.

My understanding is that guides are using children as accessories/human shields, so the US govt. is unsure of who the parents are or where they're from, so they're detained?

Prior to 2020, I considered this one of the country's greatest shames, but maybe there's some plausible operational excuse for it. I sure hope so.

To me the key difference post-Trump is that the family separation policy is no longer in effect.

If people are coming across the border with kids that they don’t have proof are theirs, what do you do?

Do we send the kids back across the border with the adults that brought them across?

How do we find the parents of these kids once they are detained?

It seems like a hard problem to me. Ideally we’d reunite these kids with their parents. The logistics of finding the parents of thousands of undocumented minors is pretty intense.

The thing is that some Trump defenders tried to make up stories about seperating kids die to trafficking to justify the Trump administration purposely seperating children from their parents to be cruel in the hope that cruelty would deter legal(assylum seekers) and illegal immigration.

In the process they lost track of where kids parents were due to incompetence

Yes, it's long been known that it was a lie and excuse, it's sad that people on this site somehow aren't aware of this. Trump had two neo-nazis in his administration, this is just some of the fallout of that.

> Trump had two neo-nazis in his administration

Bold claim. Who? Proof?

I thought it was common knowledge by now?

Stephen Miller and Stephen Bannon.

Here's some info on Miller:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-mille...

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/white-supremacy-was-behi...

And on Bannon:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/steve-bannon-has-a-n...

https://observer.com/2019/05/steve-bannon-afd-party-germany/

Bannon wasn't there for the whole presidency, but he still did damage. Miller is the reason why child separation became a thing.

Less than a month ago there were just NINE children being held, according to CBP documents cited in the CBS report. There are a further 8,100 migrant children being held at the Office of Refugee Resettlement. [0]

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrant-children-border-patrol-...

It's still an issue because the problem isn't solved, I guess. The border is porous and the country is divided as to whether or not they want to repeal immigration laws or allow foreigners to break them. But hey, if it was me I'd build a wall and prevent the children from being dragged into this by (maybe well-meaning) adults in the first place.

> Prior to 2020, I considered this one of the country's greatest shames, but maybe there's some plausible operational excuse for it. I sure hope so.

I guess now that this Obama policy is no longer being weaponized against the Trump Administration we can openly discuss this possibility.

It's amazing the volume of bad faith discussions regarding this that came out of the last four years that was nothing more than orange man bad.

It was actually the Child Separation policy enacted by Trumps government that was meant to deter immigration. You're the only one operating on bad faith here.

I call upon all entrepreneurs to invest in Mexico property and businesses like grocery stores make Mexico great again

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