Do you remember when Obama said he was going to put up billboards in South America asking people to stop sending unaccompanied children across the U.S. border? I remember.
Obama claimed human traffickers were lying to people about how they could stay in the US forever if they showed up with a child, or their children could stay if sent unaccompanied.
Tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien children were smuggled across the border and ended up in detention centers, producing the photos that were accidentally used by lefties to launch the current political hit against Trump a couple of weeks ago.
None of the people currently losing their minds over immigration policy cared about this at all. The media was not much interested in reporting it. Obama was absolved of responsibility by citing immigration laws he didn't pass, like a Bush-era law meant to combat trafficking.
The Obama White House made noises about fast-tracking deportations, but activists said the kids were better off in detention in the U.S. than if they were sent back to their countries of origin: theguardian.com/world/2014/jul…
Republicans were excoriated by left-wingers for wanting to repeal the very same law the Left is losing its mind over today, the Wilberforce Act, which mandates that children illegal brought across the border are turned over to HHS: politifact.com/punditfact/sta…
From 2008 through 2015, the debate over the Wilberforce Act was a conflict between humanitarian impulses and unintended consequences. Sending kids back to hellholes was obviously dangerous, but it also risked putting them in the hands of smugglers eager to use and abuse them.
The problem was that requiring illegal immigrant children stay in the U.S. indisputably created an incentive to send more of them. Obama was wrong and the smugglers were right: get a child onto U.S. soil and there was a very good chance they would stay.
People on both sides of the aisle said in 2008 and 2009 that illegal alien children HAD to be separated from adults and handled by a different agency (HHS) in order to properly care for them and help them navigate the immigration/asylum system: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
As with just about every other aspect of immigration, the Wilberforce Act system simply collapsed under the weight of numbers. It more or less worked with 5,000 alien children but crashed and burned when it was hit by 100,000. Overcrowded, understaffed shelters resulted.
It's possible to handle a reasonable number of immigrants and refugees who work with the system. Huge numbers mixed with political and criminal interests, foreign and domestic, that have strong incentives to sabotage the system will always be a recipe for disaster. /end
