America’s government — from the White House to the halls of Congress to the judicial benches — must treat this influx of asylum-seekers from Haiti and South and Central America as a refugee crisis.
Refugees should be met at our border and provided humane, sanitary and safe conditions while they are processed by our judicial court process that considers their case for asylum. Once refugees enter the system and are documented to await the final outcome of their case, they should be dispersed across America to cities that are ready and willing to provide the resources needed for them to get on their feet.
Instead, the refugee crisis on the border is a mess. We’ve thankfully transitioned from the days when America’s approach under President Donald Trump was to make the suffering so great at the border that refugees would stop coming. And the courts thankfully stopped the mass expulsion of asylum-seekers under both Trump’s and President Joe Biden’s Title 42 order using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to deport refugees (as though refugees were the source of the virus, which started in China and hit the U.S. long before it took a brutal toll on the less well-developed health care systems of our southern neighbors.)
