The situation of migrants in border concentration camps was already critical under the former US administration, but recent reports are revealing a whole new level of ugly.
One of the promises of the Biden administration was ending the miseries of the people somehow stuck in the US border crisis, especially children, but new footage from some of these concentration camps are exposing the horrid realities of their lives.
Latest footage from US border concentration camp holding women and children pic.twitter.com/HK731Q8Wwx
— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) April 2, 2021
“This is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents, and we are not being invaded. Which, by the way, is a white supremacist philosophy. The idea that if another is coming in the population, that this is an invasion of who we are." This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a few days ago.
"The child detention camps are here. I confronted the border officers myself. Using their names, I told them exactly what they are responsible for. One of them made eye contact with me. I spoke directly to him. I saw his sense of guilt. We can dismantle this." And this is when Ocasio-Cortez declared the migrant facilities "concentration camps" in 2018.
"I will also immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum," Kamala Harris – then a presidential candidate – said in 2019 during a primary debate. "I will release children from cages. I will get rid of the private detention centers," she added. In a related story, candidate Biden urged migrants to "surge the border" during the same debate.
More than 10,000 kids, including many of those forcibly separated from their parents, are now in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services as US officials are struggling to process them. Over 5,200 others are also stranded in Border Patrol facilities not designed for long-term custody, US media reports say.
President Biden vowed to unwind many of the immigration policies of former president Donald Trump when he assumed office, saying he would erase what he has called "a moral and national shame" inherited from Trump.
The rolling back of Trump’s immigration policies stoked illegal immigration, with large numbers of asylum seeking unaccompanied children massing on the border from Mexico.
The Biden administration has been sharply criticized by both fellow Democrats and Republicans for the handling of the refugee crisis at the southern border.
Biden stands accused of failing to respond effectively -- and of lacking transparency with the media, with his fellow Democrats criticizing his administration for using notorious Trump-era detainment facilities in Texas to keep migrant children.