New Border Policy May Help Undocumented Migrants Get Into the U.S.

The migrants have no papers. They are crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Border agents catch many and send them back to Mexico.

Before these migrants, families from Central America tried to get into the States. Mexico made a deal with America. It said it would stop these Central American families from arriving at the border. The plan is working.

President Trump said he would close the border if Mexico did not help stop the flow of families. Mexico made the deal because it could not win a fight with U.S.

What is going on now? A few months ago, countries all over the world were closing their borders. The goal was to stop the coronavirus from entering their countries. Now countries are opening to get people back to work and school. As nations open up, so do their borders. The number of people trying to cross the Mexican/U.S. border is going up.

The virus has hurt economies everywhere. Countries that have less money have it the hardest. Mexico is a poor country compared with the U.S. It has not spent enough money to help the Mexican people. That is why the number of Mexicans trying to get into the U.S. is rising again.

Trump is building a wall to stop  people from coming. It is not clear that the wall is working. What is working, but not well, is a new policy.  Trump has a new way to deal with the border crossers.

The Border Patrol no longer sends the captured crossers to detention centers. It sends them back to Mexico almost as soon as it catches them. The strategy is “catch and release.” The reason given is to prevent the spread of the virus into the U.S.

Is the new policy working? Migrants say it is…for them. They say the faster the agents release them, the faster they can try to cross the border again.

Business is good for smugglers. They bring migrants to places where the border fences are weakest. But these are also spots where the land is harshest. Southern Arizona is a desert. Migrants face dehydration, heatstroke and hunger.

We do not know how many migrants have gotten into the U.S. We do know that the Border Patrol is catching many. They report that number, and that the number is way up.

We also know there is misery in Mexico. It is the reason people will continue to make their way North. The cycle will continue.

The rise in numbers is partly due to the policy of catch and release. A new chance to try to get to the U.S.

The numbers give Trump the chance to claim that the American way of life is under attack. Was the new policy a way to give Trump a political issue? That is not clear. But it does mean that he can make preventing migrants from entering the U.S. a part of his campaign.

Source: The New York Times August 6, 2020