“They’re
arresting babies.”
The thought
struck hard, and it kept echoing. I had
come to the border wall with a correspondent from National Public Radio to see
its impact on the environment. We had also
seen evidence of the apprehensions that occur there daily. Piles of shoelaces and belts that immigrants
were forced to abandon before being taken into custody, and even a pair of
plastic toy helicopters, littered the ground.
The Border
Patrol agent said that they had captured eighteen people. Most sat in a line in the dirt beside the
rusting wall as agents took their names and bagged their possessions. Only three or four were adults.
Inside a
Border Patrol van, escaping the heat, were two mothers, each with an infant in
her arms. On the seats beside them were
a pair of toddlers.
The Border
Patrol would probably prefer not to use the term “arrest,” but the children
were taken into custody along with the rest of their family. All eighteen will be included in the sector’s
apprehension statistics.
In 2013 the
Border Patrol apprehended
26,027 juveniles in its Rio Grande Valley sector, 21,553 of whom were
unaccompanied. Border-wide 38,833 out of
the 47,238 minors who were captured were traveling without an adult. At least these children were not on their
own.
Call it an
apprehension, call it an arrest, for a child too young to walk or talk the terminology
does not matter.
The United
States of America, through elected Representatives who are meant to express the
will of its citizens, spent $18 billion last year to keep these families
out. A few years back taxpayers spent
$12 million per mile to build the border wall that stood nearby, and more than
$3 billion was spent to wall off 652 miles of the southern border. From 1995 to 2003 we doubled the size of the
Border Patrol, then over the last decade we doubled their ranks again. They carry out the mission that we have given
them.
We are
arresting babies.
And
toddlers. And teenagers. And adolescents. And their parents.
We have
decided that the people I saw lined up beside the wall, parents who traveled
hundreds of miles from Guatemala looking for work with children in tow,
threaten us.
Like most
who walk or swim across the border they are not terrorists, they are not
smugglers, they simply want a better life.
They are parents struggling to feed their families. They are children hoping to escape violence,
go to school, live the American Dream. So
long as that desperation and desire remains people will keep coming.
This is not
a challenge to our nation’s defenses, it is a test of our conscience.
When the
Senate took up immigration reform they failed to grasp this. They made a “border surge,” with hundreds of
miles of new border wall, a further ballooning of the Border Patrol, and tens
of billions of dollars of new military hardware, a “trigger” that must be
completed before anyone currently in the country could start on a
thirteen-year-long pathway to citizenship. The irrational fears of middle American voters
who only see the border when they watch FOX News or Border Wars on TV had to be
appeased.
Even with
the “surge” Republicans in the U.S. House refuse to even debate immigration
reform. They are far less concerned with
the children sitting in a line on the dirt beside the wall than they are about
a Tea Party challenge in the next primary election.
The Border
Patrol agents called headquarters to have child car seats sent out. Older kids shuffled back into the green and
white van, now lacking belts and laces for their sneakers.
After they
drove off we began to walk back along the top of the levee. Through the border wall’s rusting bollards we
could see another mother being marched out of the brush, clutching an infant to
her chest.
As the sun
settled into the treetops the wind carried the baby’s cries.
