Have you heard about the surge?

 

It’s a border surge of illegal immigrants in South Texas.  50,000 so far this year.  It is a crisis.

 

Proposed solutions are simple.  Build a wall.  (We already did.)  Put more boots on the border.  (We already did.)  Just say no?  Why don’t those darned Mexicans just stay in Mexico?

 

It’s not simple though, it’s complicated.

 

Mexico is being flooded with illegals too.  It’s not mostly Mexicans coming across now, it is primarily refugees from three countries to the south of Mexico: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.  The current surge of illegals that come to our country have already crossed a thousand miles of Mexico just to get to our border.  What is particularly horrifying about the surge is that a majority of them are unaccompanied children; teens and preteens.  It’s not hard to catch them; we’ve watched them just walk right up and turn themselves in.

 

If apprehended illegals are from Mexico, there is a straightforward solution (albeit temporary).  Put them on a bus, take them back across the border, and dump them.  This surge is different though.  These kids have traveled a thousand miles and are sick, hungry, dehydrated, confused, and abused.  And we can’t send them back to Mexico because they don’t even live in Mexico.  They need food, water, clothing, and medical attention before we even begin to repatriate them.

 

Can you imagine a situation in a home country so desperate that parents would turn their children over to traffickers who will deliver them, for a price, across the border to be caught and processed through our immigration system?  It’s not that they don’t love their children, it’s that they do and think sending them alone to the United States, hoping they survive, is the best option for them.  And at our end, there aren’t even facilities for housing unaccompanied children.  We have jail cells, not residential facilities.  We can’t keep up.  There is widely held belief in Central America that any children apprehended on our side of the border are allowed to stay.  So the longer it takes us to process these kids and get them back to the violence and hopelessness of their own country, the more we reinforce the story that kids that make it across the border are home free.

 

Yeah.  It’s complicated.