The Biden administration owns the human tragedy at the southern border

On a trip to the southern border in 2014, I witnessed firsthand the extreme conditions facing unaccompanied alien children (UAC). Now, almost 10 years later, it is even more disturbing to hear reports of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra comparing these children to assembly line widgets. Becerra reportedly said of the asylum process, “If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become rich and famous. This is not the way you do an assembly line.”

Our immigration system has long been broken, but it has become astonishingly cruel because of the open border policies of the Biden administration. Here the sad reality is that children are used as pawns to game our immigration system constantly. Smugglers know that an adult arriving in the U.S. with a child is granted entry, while single adults are more likely to be turned away.

To clamp down on smuggling, the Trump administration placed children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) while their parent or arriving adult went through initial judicial proceedings. Many decried this as inhumane and cruel. We all remember the pictures of “kids in cages” — though the media conveniently left out the fact that the pictures had been taken in 2014, under the Obama administration.