Today, mainstream Democrats want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), provide free healthcare to illegal immigrants, and let tens of thousands of migrants loose in American towns and cities. But it wasn’t long ago that left-wing politicians supported strict border control measures at the southern border.
Just five years ago, President Barack Obama delivered a message to Central American families who were contributing to a humanitarian disaster at the U.S.-Mexico border: “Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”
Tough love
Such a threat, if uttered by the current president, would immediately evoke accusations of racism and xenophobia from the new left’s ultra-sensitive outrage brigade. But in 2014, Obama’s threat was applauded as firm but necessary — tough talk from a passionate progressive.
Indeed, Obama faced a similar challenge during his second term to the one his successor is currently experiencing. Mobilized by the promise of amnesty, thousands of Central and South American minors flooded the border until holding facilities were overflowing with asylum-seekers.
In hopes of remedying the issue, Obama warned migrant families in an interview with ABC News in 2014 that their children could become the victims of human trafficking rings and other hazards.
He was very clear that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents would turn away children, despite the hundreds of miles it took them to reach American soil.
“That is our direct message to the families in Central America: Do not send your children to the borders,” Obama said. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they might not make it.”
2014 is not ancient history. Can someone please explain why this was not portrayed at the time as a morally abominable statement? pic.twitter.com/tUvMnFmxVs
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 26, 2019
Incentivizing illegal immigration
In 2012, the Obama administration issued a policy that gave young illegal immigrants a two-year deferral from removal proceedings and allowed them to find legal employment. But some experts, like Obama’s own Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, believed that this policy incentivized the migration of young Central Americans, even though the order only applied to illegal alien minors who had been in the country since 2007.
And after he helped create the conditions that enticed an estimated 60,000 immigrant children to travel to the U.S. in 2014, Obama failed to properly deal with the unexpected influx. In a five-year span, CBP agents used tear gas against migrant detainees 79 times, separated families, and threw children in cages.
The new radical left
However, American voters wouldn’t know that these were once progressive policies based on recent Democratic primary debates. 2020 presidential hopeful Julián Castro argued Wednesday evening that all illegal border crossings should be decriminalized, and he criticized former Texas Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke for saying that only migrants fleeing from violence and war should be allowed asylum.
Even Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden, who once called for “a fence 40 stories high,” lambasted the “horrifying scenes at the border” under Trump on Thursday, and declared that people caught crossing the border illegally should not be subject to deportation.
Speaking in 2010, Obama disagreed. “The presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are going through the process of immigrating legally,” he said.
It’s hard not to agree.
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