Crosstalk: April 3, 2019

On Thursday, March 28, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen wrote a letter to members of the United States Senate and members of the House with an urgent request. Her four page letter told of the dire situation occurring at the borders and that the volume of vulnerable populations is unsustainable. She indicated that we are facing a system-wide meltdown. She told about the children who are being put at high risk by this emergency and the threats to both life and property. She pleads with the members of Congress for emergency resources and to deal with the underlying causes of this emergency and the necessity to restore order.

Joining Jim to discuss this issue was Andrew Arthur. Andrew is the senior resident fellow for law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Andrew began by noting the following statistics:

In the ’90’s we had one and a half million people show up at the border. At the end of this year it’s projected that we’ll be looking at between 1 and 1.2 million people that will be entering illegally.

The most important point is the demographics of this flow of aliens. We used to see single adult males from Mexico. Border patrol could process those individuals in about 8 hours and send them back across the border at the end of that 8 hour period.

Today we’re seeing mostly adults with a child or children as well as unaccompanied alien children. It takes about 78.5 hours to process each of those individuals. At the end of the process they can’t simply be sent back because Mexico won’t take them. So we can either detain them here or release them. The problem is that we don’t have enough detention space so most of them are being released. When that news gets back to their home villages, it encourages more people to come here.

Andrew also indicated that we’re starting to see a larger number of men with children rather than women with children. These men know that if they get into the U.S., because of flaws in our laws, they’ll be released within 20 days and they can simply disappear into the general population.

Is this crisis clogging up the system and thereby causing delays for those with legitimate asylum concerns? What about the humanitarian issue? How does smuggling and drug trafficking play into all of this? Is Congress guilty of legislative malpractice on this issue?

Get the answers to these and other questions when you review this vital Crosstalk broadcast.