Remember the border crisis, the one involving tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who have crossed into the U.S. illegally?
It hasn’t gone away just because other issues, such as the barbarity of the Islamic State, have taken center stage.
And yet Congress still hasn’t agreed on how to deal with it. True, the House passed a bill before last month’s recess that would change a problematic 2008 law making it difficult to deport unaccompanied minors from Central America. But the bill included only $694 million in funding to handle the influx — not enough.
Meanwhile, Democrats are dug in against changing the 2008 law, so it’s difficult to see how a compromise could even be structured. It’s another example of Washington gridlock on an important issue that demands political attention.
Back in Colorado, the border crisis has become an unexpected issue in the governor’s race, thanks to ill-advised comments by Republican Bob Beauprez in radio interviews.
Beauprez has said a number of curious things about the crisis. He’s offered to “step up” and send Colorado National Guard troops to the Mexican border if another governor asked him to — although it’s not possible for such troops to act in a military capacity there.
He’s said the kids have “got to stay on the border. … to bring them this far inland makes it that much more difficult to send them back home.” Really? Don’t we have a pretty good airport?
And he described the reaction in some locales to the possibility of housing young migrants as “chaos breaking out,” and cited people “from our southern cities” who told him that “if buses show up [with migrants in them], they will be in the streets to block them.”
Presumably Beauprez deplores such sentiments, although he didn’t in that interview.
We don’t need yahoos blocking buses. We need Congress to provide funding for faster and more humane processing of the minors — and to address more broadly the broken system that we have.
