Trump owns the border catastrophe

Max Boot

WashingtonPost.com

In America’s squalid border facilities, even children are treated worse than prisoners of war, said Max Boot, yet President Trump “gives every appearance that he could not care less.” New investigations of these facilities should shock anyone with a conscience: Adults were crowded in so tightly at one camp they could not lie down, and at the detention center in Clint, Texas, up to 700 children, “some as young as 5 months old,” lack sufficient beds and have no place to wash. Outbreaks of chicken pox and other illnesses are rampant, and the stench is so overwhelming that agents’ clothes reek. Trump is blaming everyone but himself, including the migrants for seeking legal asylum in the first place. But it’s Trump’s “incompetence” and cruelty that have turned a crisis into a catastrophe. His only strategy for discouraging Central American migration has been to signal to Border Patrol agents “that they have carte blanche to be as brutal as they want to be.” In a Facebook group of roughly 9,500 current and former agents, members routinely mocked the suffering of migrants and referred to them with racial slurs. Trump “will never escape responsibility for this horror show.”

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