Republicans and Democrats sent dueling delegations to the southern US border on Friday, in an attempt to frame perceptions of the Biden administration’s immigration policy amid an uptick in recent weeks in border crossings by undocumented migrants.
A group of Republican senators led by Ted Cruz of Texas presented their trip as an exposé of dire circumstances, with Cruz sharing video of himself on Thursday night standing in darkness next to the Rio Grande river and falsely warning about a “flood” of human smuggling.
A group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives led by Joaquín Castro of Texas described a different vulnerability at the border, that of unaccompanied children held by the US government.
The Democratic delegation planned on Friday to visit children at a Department of Health and Human Services facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to ensure “that they’re treated humanely”, Castro said.
Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from El Paso, Texas, blasted Cruz on Twitter on Friday for what O’Rourke implied was a political charade designed to slow the momentum of Joe Biden, who has presided over a successful coronavirus vaccine rollout, signed an $1.9tn economic relief package and announced plans for a similar big spend on infrastructure.
“The truth is, the number of individual asylum seekers and immigrants seeking to come to this country is the SAME or LOWER than it was in 2019 when [Donald] Trump was President (and you were, apparently, Senator),” O’Rourke sniped at Cruz. “This isn’t any more of a crisis today than it was then.”
After two election cycles in which the former president’s strategy of fearmongering about supposed pressure on the border produced a Republican rout in midterm elections and then his own defeat, Cruz and colleagues returned to the strategy once again with a two-day, high-profile tour of border areas that included almost one quarter of the party’s senators.
One member of the delegation, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, tweeted video from a visibly crowded border detention facility on Friday, claiming the facility was holding almost 10 times its intended capacity.
Cruz was trying on Friday to get the hashtag “#Bidenbordercrisis” going on Twitter.
Biden said in a news conference on Thursday: “I’m ready to work with any Republican who wants to help solve the problem. Or make the situation better.”
But the president sought to draw a sharp line between his border policies and those of his predecessor.
“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, ‘If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side’ – no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.”
Trump enacted a policy of family separation at the border, taking more than 5,500 children from their parents and then failing to keep track of the separated families, ultimately stranding hundreds of children whose parents could not be found, according to court documents.
Biden has placed Kamala Harris in charge of addressing the situation on the border. In an interview earlier this week the vice-president said that she and Biden would “absolutely” visit the border in person.
“They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said of people crossing the border. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said a nine-year-old child from Mexico died last week while trying to reach the US border.
“US border patrol agents assigned to Del Rio sector’s marine unit rescued two migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, March 20,” the agency said in a statement released on Thursday. “US border patrol marine unit agents responded to assist three individuals stranded on an island on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River.”
Border agents administered first aid to the three migrants. Two of them, a woman from Guatemala and her three-year-old child, regained consciousness, but the third, a child from Mexico, did not and was later pronounced dead by medical officials.
“We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of this small child,” the Del Rio sector chief patrol agent, Austin L Skero II, said in the statement.
A member of the Democratic border delegation, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, spotlighted the plight of children held in US border detention facilities.
“Heading to the southern border with 7 year old Jakelin Caal on my mind,” Tlaib tweeted on Friday morning. “She died in detention, in our care, in 2018. I want to make sure no child dies like this, with conditions that we control.”
