Stop blaming Trump

Keizer OR

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ARTICAL: ‘Stop blaming Trump’: Immigration advocates call on Biden to address the border crisis Some things have changed on the southern border, but a lot of things remain the same, according to Catholic humanitarian groups on the ground. The Biden administration last month began processing the asylum applications of migrants under the current Migrant Protection Protocols, a Trump administration policy that empowered immigration officials to return thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico to await court decisions in the immigration court system. The highest concentration of migrants have been waiting in Ciudad Juárez, just south of El Paso, Tex. Advertisement Dylan Corbett, the executive director of the Hope Border Institute, has noted an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors in the area. “The United States is obligated to receive, to ensure their safety and to keep them in the least restrictive setting possible—and to reunite them with their families or sponsors in other parts of the country,” he said. But because of the overload at the border, some minors are exceeding a 72-hour court-mandated limit for detention with the Border Patrol. The El Paso Times reported last week that the Border Patrol was detaining hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children, and many had been in detention for more than two days at a time. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki seemed to blame the Trump administration for the current trouble at the border, saying the “last administration left us with a dismantled and unworkable system.” The Biden administration is calling on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to manage the record number of unaccompanied immigrant children, The Associated Press reports. “We can no longer blame the Trump administration. We need the Biden administration to come up with a plan and take responsibility so that we can manage what’s happening here.”