Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border was a “challenge ” President Joe Biden is managing after former President Donald Trump left the immigration system in “tatters.”
Castro said, “Trump left our immigration system in tatters through policies like Remain in Mexico, through metering, through Title 42, which allowed them to expel thousands of people and deny them entry including over 13,000 children. So he created a pent-up demand, this bubble of people who want to come in and claim asylum. That is part of what we’re seeing. It’s true that we’ve had people presenting themselves in waves before we saw that under President Obama, and we saw it in 2019 under Donald Trump.
He added, “Trump weakened our ability to handle the situations, so basically Joe Biden is left to pick up the pieces of a human rights catastrophe that Donald Trump left at our doorstep. Now the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to immigration is that with Joe Biden, you have someone who is competent. You have an administration that is actually taking the steps necessary to solve this challenge. You heard Secretary Mayorkas, but among other things, they’ve increased the inner agency cooperation, they have cut through a lot of the red tape that actually gets these children who are unaccompanied into acceptable housing facilities and then more quickly get them to host families, so they’re with their sponsor or host family instead of in one of his facilities. They have done the compassionate thing, which is not to say no, not to reject an eight-year-old or ten-year-old child when they present themselves as at the border unaccompanied. That reflects our values as Americans. I don’t consider this as a crisis. I agree it is a challenge. It could be managed and that the administration is effectively managing.”
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