The Media Rebrand ‘Kids in Cages’

Beware the Ides of March. The Biden administration is having an increasingly difficult time grappling with the “unprecedented crisis” on our southern border, and the national media are having an increasingly difficult time pretending that Joe Biden’s rhetoric and policies had nothing to do with the surge of migrants arriving now. Meanwhile, some recent statistics about alleged Republican skepticism over the coronavirus vaccine are not quite as convincing as some in the media would like to believe.

It’s No Longer ‘Kids in Cages,’ Just ‘Children in Facilities Similar to Jail’

Hey, remember how then-candidate Joe Biden denounced the “Trump-created humanitarian crisis at our border”? Good times, good times. It turns out humanitarian crises at the southern border are a lot easier to create than the Biden team thought.

There’s a dark humor to watching media institutions such as ABC News trying to acknowledge that the new administration that is (How Refreshing)™ is now putting record numbers of migrant children in “facilities similar to jail,” which sounds suspiciously like the “kids in cages” we previously saw denounced as a “moral stain” on our nation by both the media and Democratic senators.

The number of unaccompanied teens and children in U.S. custody along the U.S.-Mexico border has reached record numbers, forcing children to stay longer in perilously overcrowded border facilities, many of which are similar to jail, multiple sources who reviewed the most recent government data told ABC News. There are now 4,276 children in custody, up from about 3,400 earlier in the week. It is a 25 percent increase, which sources tell ABC News is troubling and could lead to the kind of environment last seen during the 2018-2019 surge, in which six migrant children died in U.S. custody.

Overcrowding, measured in pre-pandemic levels, has spiked, various sources who reviewed recent government data told ABC News. Rio Grande Valley is at 363 percent capacity and all the major Border patrol sectors are at well over 100 percent capacity.

CBS News offers more details about the treatment of migrant children under the new administration’s management:

Children interviewed on Thursday by lawyers conducting oversight as part of a federal court case reported sleeping on the floor; being hungry; only showering once in as many as seven days; and not being able to call family members.

“One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window,” Neha Desai, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, told CBS News, citing interviews with nearly a dozen children, including an unaccompanied 8-year-old girl.

I’ll remind you that the vice president used to say, “This is a president who has pushed policies that’s been about putting babies in cages at the border in the name of security when in fact what it is, is a human-rights abuse being committed by the United States government.” How would Harris characterize the treatment of children in CBP facilities now?

Is it any less of a human-rights abuse when she and Biden do it?