A common refrain from those on the left who oppose President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the United States’ southern border is their concern for the well-being of migrants’ children, who they say are being mistreated by U.S. immigration officials.
As such, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) recently called for the United Nations to take over control of the U.S.-Mexico border — in spite of the international body’s long track record of abusing and exploiting vulnerable women and children in refugee situations.
The U.N. at the U.S. border
Breitbart reported that Omar was speaking at an event in her home district when she mentioned the crisis at the southern border.
“We should do what any other country does, by dealing with this situation in a serious way,” Omar said. “We have to bring in the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees — an agency that has the expertise and the training to handle massive flows of refugees humanely.”
Of course, this would be a grievous injury to U.S. national sovereignty that would undermine President Trump’s efforts to secure the border and manage the inflow of migrants in an orderly — and legal — fashion.
But worse, Breitbart reports that the international body has a recurring problem with peacekeeping forces sexually abusing, exploiting, and mistreating migrant children and women when placed in control over vulnerable populations.
A history of abuse
Indeed, going all the way back to the 1990s, U.N. peacekeepers in war-ravaged Bosnia were slammed with numerous allegations of raping and pillaging the local population they were tasked with keeping safe from harm.
Moreover, in the mid-2000s, a BBC investigation uncovered “systematic abuse” by U.N. peacekeepers in African nations like Congo, Liberia, and South Sudan, among others.
In fact, the U.N. even admitted in a 2007 report that at least 300 “civilians, police, and military personnel on U.N. peacekeeping duties had been investigated for sexual misconduct over a three-year period,” according to Breitbart. “An additional 91 of the U.N.’s own staffers had been accused of rape, sexual assault, having sex with minors, offering jobs in exchange for sex, and other malfeasances,” the outlet reported.
More recently, there were media reports from 2016 of U.N. peacekeepers observing — but doing nothing to stop — the alleged sexual abuse of young girls and women in refugee camps in Congo. And multiple media reports in 2017 and 2018 indicated that there were numerous claims of sexual assault by U.N. peacekeepers against women and children in Congo and South Sudan — claims that were too often ignored.
Making things worse
Given that documented record of mistreatment of migrants and refugees by U.N. peacekeepers and staffers — in conjunction with concerns about a threat to American sovereignty — Omar’s suggestion to hand control of the U.S. southern border over to the U.N. would likely only make the situation worse.
It’s just further proof that the Democrats will do anything, and stoop to any level, to make President Trump look bad — even if it means potentially putting innocent children in harm’s way.
No comments: