White House Defends Migration by Family Separation

MISSION, TEXAS - MARCH 23: Asylum seekers, most from Honduras, walk towards a U.S. Border
John Moore/Getty Images

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki defended the administration’s policy of admitting migrants into the United States if they first separate themselves from their families.

Psaki was asked April 15, “Some of your own administration’s immigration [officials] … have said that some migrant families are, in their words, ‘self-separating’ at the border and sending their kids across alone because they know that unaccompanied minors are not going to be turned away.”

“Well, you’re right, Todd,” Psaki responded. “That certainly is an unintended consequence … even as families are doing that, a number of these kids are still in — taking a very dangerous journey.”

But President Joe Biden’s administration will continue to accept migrants who separate themselves from their families, Psaki added, “I don’t think we have any intention to rethink our approach to treating kids humanely and ensuring that they are safe when they cross the border.”

The admission was almost entirely hidden by the pro-establishment media.

The administration’s policy is to “bring the world here, one relative at a time,” despite Congress’s immigration laws, which envision roughly one million people per year, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA.

Children and teenagers are accepted via the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” doorway, while mothers and fathers with some children are filtered via the “Family Unit,” asylum lane. Central American adults are allowed to make repeated dashes through the border, and if caught in the border zone, are returned without penalty to the five-yard line in Mexico, she said.

Under President Donald Trump, children, families, and adults were legally rejected and flown back to reunite with their extended families in their home countries.

Separated children are “a prop in the [Biden] enforcement theater at the border,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies:

The question is “What’s the problem at the border?” And the problem is for the left that children are not being accommodated comfortably enough and they’re not being processed quickly, and that’s the problem to solve — as opposed to the problem being a surge of illegal aliens coming across the border, which is the actual problem … It’s a cynical use of children in order to allow large scale illegal migration into the United States.

Progressives are fine with separation by migration, he added, because:

Trump’s seperation of parents and their children [was hated by progressives because it] was in service of enforcing the border. This [family separation] is justified in the sense of “We have to break eggs to make an omlet,” because the goal is to pry open the border. It always open-borders uber alles with the left these days.

The separated children provide compelling drama for the media — such as this video of a child who became separated from a large group of coyote-guided migrant children, after first being separated by his mother’s earlier economic migration into the United States:

Most of the migrant children at the border are teenagers seeking to work in the U.S. for their families, although often under abusive conditions controlled by their traffickers and often alongside a parent, relatives, and home-country neighbors.

But many of the younger children are being transported northwards by coyotes under contract with one of their parents who had earlier separated themselves from their kids to get jobs in the United States.

This chain migration of family fragments is risky to parents and children. Still, it is quietly approved by the federal government — except for Trump’s government — because the migration-by-separation smuggles a reserve army of workers, extra consumers, and high-occupancy renters into the United States for use by U.S. businesses.

The White House’s endorsement of family separation follows three years of emotional denunciations of the short-term family separations caused by President Donald Trump’s enforcement of border laws.

The emotional reaction to Trump’s policies by Democrat legislation, pro-migration activists, and the establishment media included descriptions like “torture,” “barbaric,” “cruel,” “fundamental human rights violations,” “heartbreaking” and “horrific,” “notorious,” and “disaster.” An October 2020 New York Times news article declared that Trump’s “expediency led to cruelty.”

The Washington Post‘s editorial board declared, “the operation was executed, deliberately and with forethought, as a means of deterrence — to frighten migrants so badly that they would not dare cross the border without papers.” The separations of migrants’ families were “zero-tolerance barbarism … As of late August, more than 500 children still languished in government custody — scared, confused and unsure of ever seeing their parents again,” the New York Times‘ editorial board claimed in August 2018.

In an October 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden declared the policy to be “criminal.”

Pro-amnesty business advocates are still using the progressives’ separations narrative to push for cheap labor. Peter Boogard, the communication director for a pro-migration group of wealthy investors at FWD.us, claimed, “cruelty” or “cruel” seven times in a March 29 op-ed in USA Today:

We’ve just left behind four years of President Donald Trump’s cruelty as a deterrence border policy and saw firsthand that his approach was a failure by any moral, substantive or political measure. We can’t return to those misguided policies.

The White House’s pro-migration political strategy is built on family separation, Jenks said.

Biden’s deputies are quietly opening different doors for separate categories of Central American migrants — children, parents, adults —  she said, adding, “they created this, knowing exactly how it would go … This is intentional.”

The vast majority of U.S. progressives calmly accept these family separations because they are endorsed by their political leaders, said, Krikorian:

The outrage [under Trump] was genuine … But they are now cynically rationalizing similar [separation] results because it serves the purpose of prying open the border. A year ago, orange-man-bad was doing it. Now their own guy is doing it … [and] their reaction is going to be less intense.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedintra-Democraticrational, and recognizes the national solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly Leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.

It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

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