Toddlers without diapers. Children as young as 7 caring for infants they just met. Soap and toothpaste nowhere to be found. Dangerous overcrowding. Illnesses spreading. A father and daughter drowning.
This is the agonizing humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S.-Mexico border. President Trump did not cause it; a huge flow of desperate people, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, did. But the president's punishing primal-scream response has exacerbated the misery.
Our great nation is a beacon to people from around the world. Right now, they are arriving by the thousands from the Southern Triangle, fleeing gang violence, domestic violence, chaos and bad economic conditions. When they reach the border, they typically request asylum.
Not all qualify; indeed, many surely do not. But under international and U.S. law, all are owed a hearing. Instead, today, men and women and children languish in unfit detention facilities for weeks and months on end, and the anguish only mounts.
This is not a choice between orderly and open borders, as the president pretends. It is a choice between humane and decent management of a problem and a juvenile, ideological refusal to wrestle honestly with it in hopes that it can be shouted away.
Congressional Democrats, who just agreed with Republicans on a necessary short-term humanitarian aid package, are offering a sane long-term way forward. They would:
create new avenues for migrants to apply for refugee status elsewhere, rather than converging on the border.
invest in a crushingly overwhelmed immigration court system, which has exhausted its capacity to process people and make swift judgments about whether they deserve asylum.
expand programs to track asylum seekers while they await hearings.
codify into law better humanitarian standards, including access to recreation time, basic supplies and child-welfare services.
and invest in Central America to fix the problems fueling the outflow, not petulantly cut off aid as Trump has done.
On the campaign trail, many would-be presidents have coalesced behind making border-crossing a civil rather than a criminal violation. That wouldn't rationalize the flow; it would invite it to grow.
