“The U.S. Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point”
“Experts say the president is not wrong when he says that ‘legal loopholes’ in America’s immigration system are partly responsible for encouraging migrants to bring children on a dangerous journey that in some cases ends in tragedy.”
Of course, Trump is not correct about the fact that these people are drug lords, terrorists and criminals. They are almost all just poor people, often ill people, desperate for a better life. The only real danger they represent consists of the diseases they carry.
“The majority of our agents get sick. Infectious disease is everywhere. There’s always scabies in there. Usually we have chickenpox. We have tuberculosis in there. You name it, it’s probably been through that building. So it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for our agents. It’s dangerous for the detainees that don’t have anything.”
The distinction between Trump’s perception and reality seems irrelevant, because the real point is just that there are too many of them and our system can no longer process them effectively. As the FNYT reports: “The flow of migrant families has reached record levels, with February totals 560 percent above those for the same period last year.” Trump may be confused about the nature of the danger, but he seems to be correct that the danger is real.
And the most depressing element of this situation is that nobody seems to have a solution, and the few ideas that might be tried are rejected by one side of the aisle or the other, so the backlog just keeps piling up.