The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs convened this week to discuss the unprecedented number of migrants at the southern border. As the senators assembled, three young women stood in unison wearing matching pink shirts and signs with the words “No Racism, No Hate” in bold letters. A police officer informed them they would be arrested if they didn’t sit down. Throughout the often-tense meeting, both Republicans and Democrats acknowledged the direness of the situation at the border, though the committee members diverged about the best way to address the crisis.
“Nobody – not one person – is satisfied with what’s happening on the border,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, describing a chaotic scene he recently witnessed. “When I visited a detention center in El Paso … I passed a 45-year-old man with a screaming 18-month-year-old in his arms. Look, I know children can be fussy, but that girl was not his daughter. This is what it has come to.”
Johnson asserted that the U.S. must tighten asylum laws in order to discourage mass migration and to prevent traffickers from assembling “fraudulent families” in the hopes of shortening their stay in detention facilities.
Members of Congress heard from two experts advising the committee: Jennifer Costello, Deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security, and Mark Morgan, a police officer who served as Acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from January of 2017 to June of 2018. The senators questioned the experts to learn how the situation at the border escalated to a crisis.
Recounting his recent trip to the border, Johnson continued: “There was a child being sold and trafficked for $84 and another young boy left in a field with just a name and a phone number written on his shoe. And what is being done to stop this?”
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) raised different concerns. While she is in favor of the allocation of more funds to CBP, she is concerned by the surfacing of recent, abrasive Facebook posts by Border Patrol agents and CBP officers. In early July, ProPublica published an article revealing sexist and xenophobic posts inside a secret Border Patrol Facebook group.
“The revelation of the Facebook page and the number of people participating in that tends to give credence to the notion that there is a troubling culture to at least some of the officers,” she said. “… What you are doing to make sure you are disrupting that culture?” Hassan asked.
Even with a few months still remaining, border patrol agents have already apprehended more people at the southern border in FY2019 (over 700,000) than in all of FY2018 (521,090).
Morgan urged the members of Congress to dig deeper to more fully understand the causes of the border crisis. “We are merely treating the symptoms of this crisis, but we aren’t curing the disease,” he said. “We aren’t running concentration camps or denying people drinking water. Yes, there is overcrowding in the centers, but if we don’t identify and address the root problem, we won’t solve anything.”
Castello expanded on the strained situation at detention facilities, informing members of Congress that children, some under seven, are being detained for over two weeks at a time. “Children are being detained well beyond 72 hours,” she said, explaining that the prolonged time in the detention facilities contributes to rising tensions among the detainees.
“What’s worse is that CBP is not responsible for providing long-term detention nor is it designed to hold individuals for any length or period of time.” Castello added.
Near the end of the congressional hearing, Johnson addressed the two witnesses and the crowd: “Ask yourself: How would you handle this?”
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
