The Daily - Is There a Crisis at the Border?

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

President Trump plans to address the nation tonight about what he calls “the humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border.” But much of that chaos could be a result of the administration’s policies. Guest: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the president plans to address the nation tonight about what he calls, quote, the humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border. Is there one? It's Tuesday, January 8th.

As we speak, we are in the middle of an unprecedented crisis on our southern border. The agents on the ground say it's the worst they've ever seen and that the American people aren't being told the truth about what's happening. But you people know the truth because you're here. Ever since he was a candidate, President Trump has described a crisis at the southwest border so severe that the country is teetering on the edge of imminent doom. People, drugs, and cartels are pouring across the border. This crisis is putting enormous stress on your schools, your hospitals, your jobs, and your wages. You know that. Do you know that? I mean, everybody knows that. In the president's mind and in his words, we have a crisis of illegal immigration. That's an invasion. That's not, that's an invasion.

An invasion of criminals, terrorists, and rapists who are invading the country. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. In particular, he talks about the safety of women who are at risk of rape. We have some bad hombres here and we're going to get them out. By bad hombres. And they're taking your jobs and you better be careful. You better be careful. Putting the economy at risk by stealing Americans' jobs. Caitlin Dickerson covers immigration for The Times.

And it's also grown. So now when the president describes this crisis, he doesn't just talk about illegal immigration. He talks about kind of anybody who's crossing the border for any reason at all. All of it is a crisis, he says. And the only way to stop this crisis that he describes is by building a wall. And how much of this quote-unquote crisis that he is describing is real, accurate, true? So at the risk of oversimplifying, none of it is true. Just to be clear, there's no significant body of research to back up any of these ideas, even though we hear them repeated all the time. For example, illegal immigration is decreasing, and it has been for several years. And in fact, the majority of new illegal immigrants every year, they come and they overstay visas.

So they're actually being welcomed into the United States in a legal way and then they don't leave when they're supposed to. And the list goes on whether we're talking about crime or we're talking about the economy. There's just no evidence to support that immigrants or illegal people are illegally crossing the border from the South through Mexico into the United States and creating all of these problems, that is essentially a manufactured crisis. It's not real. All this time that the president has been talking about this crisis that doesn't exist, something else has come up, a very real problem. And it has to do with a legal immigration process, people coming here to seek asylum. The world has been following the journey of that caravan of asylum seekers. These immigrant caravans coming from Central America through Mexico. coming from Central America through Mexico. Estimates of the caravan sizes vary widely,

but according to Mexican and Salvadorian officials, they include about 8,000 people. A lot of people talk about there's a caravan coming. In this area, in McAllen, we see a caravan a week. They're largely coming from Central America. They're coming in much higher numbers than we've seen in a very long time. And not only that, but they're of an entirely different demographic background.

They're largely women and children. And the system they're being funneled into here in the U.S. is not at all equipped to take care of them, to hold them and house them while they go through the immigration process.

So while the president is talking about illegal immigration as a crisis, there's another problem emerging at the border of legal immigration surrounding asylum seekers. What does the Trump administration do about that? They've largely ignored it or denied it or mischaracterized it and instead focused completely on this idea of deterrence, of keeping out illegal immigrants. So they're fully focused on coming up with new deterrent policies like family separation and the asylum ban,

which were blocked by federal courts. He sent National Guard troops and Army troops to the border to fortify existing barriers and put up concertina wire to keep out criminals. In the meantime, they're doing nothing to address these families and doing nothing to modify, for example, the facilities that asylum seekers wait in. And they're supposed to only be there a couple of days, but sometimes they're there much longer. These facilities aren't set up for children, and almost nothing has been done to change that. And as a result, this very real problem we've talked about has gotten even worse. This very real problem we've talked about has gotten even worse. And how exactly has this approach of cracking down on illegal immigration, even though there wasn't really much of a problem there, how has that made the problem of those seeking asylum worse exactly? Well, first of all, two children have died.

The facilities, like we said, are not at all set up to take care of children. And it's flu season. So not only are their families piling up at the border, but children are very sick. And then on top of that, there's this policy called metering, which we've talked about, which means limiting the number of people who can come into the country and seek asylum each day. So as a result, the families that used to show up at the border and be processed into the United States on the same day, they're actually waiting in Mexico sometimes for weeks or for months, and they're basically living in squalor. The conditions they're waiting in are dirty. There's a lack of resources. There's a lack of clean water. There's a lack of food and places to bathe, and their illnesses are sort of incubating there in Mexico. They're getting worse, and then they're finally let into the United States, where again, we're sort of unprepared to deal with them. Metering has also created more of a market for smuggling, and it's encouraged people to come into the United States between ports of entry. This is something that the president has discouraged publicly.

But when, you know, your options are to wait in line and perhaps get into the United States in a few weeks or a few months and get sicker or to try to go around and sneak into the United States with the help of a smuggler, a lot of people are taking that second route. Again, it's a problem that's created by the president's attempt to thwart illegal immigration. So it sounds like when President Trump says that there is a serious crisis at the southern border, he's right. It's just that it's of his own making and it involves asylum seekers rather than undocumented immigrants trying to illegally cross the border.

Exactly. So, for example, last week I interviewed officials who work along the border in Arizona. And they told me about what's happening in Yuma where actually 87 percent of people who cross the border are traveling as part of a family. More than half of the total people who cross the border are children. more than half of the total people who cross the border are children. And people who run that port of entry have been asking for over a year for resources to build a new facility to take care of children. And, you know, as one official put it, it's nothing fancy. It's basically more than the concrete cells we have right now. So something that would have beds and that would have showers. But those requests have gone ignored because all of the focus is on deterrence. None of it is on the real situation on the ground, this dire situation. Involving asylum seekers.

Involving asylum seekers, especially children. So in Yuma, you have kids who are sick walking around with Mylar blankets and carrying around bottles of Pedialyte because they have the flu and they're sleeping on concrete. So in the face of a very specific request for a resource, a detention facility, as you said, to house children, the administration said no and is instead focusing still on deterring basically anything it considers to be undocumented immigration across the southern border. Exactly. What I'm being told by people who work in immigration policy is that they have one mission right now, and it's to come up with new ways to discourage people from coming to the United States with really no attention being paid to what's actually happening right now along the border. We'll be right back. The president is going to address the nation tomorrow night to discuss what he calls the national security crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Donald Trump will travel to the southern border on Thursday to meet with those on the front lines of the national security and humanitarian crisis.

More details will be announced soon. It's not sure what format that will come in. So, Caitlin, the president announced on Monday that he will be addressing the country on Tuesday night about this crisis at the border, as he calls it. And he'll then travel to the border on Thursday to do the same thing. Given everything that you've told us, which crisis do you believe he will be pointing to and discussing when he makes both of these speeches? I think based on what we've seen and heard from the president in the past, he'll be very unlikely to make any distinction at all. So coming to the United States illegally and seeking asylum couldn't be more different.

But I think instead of making that point and instead of acknowledging the ways in which the policies and ideas that he's come up with so far haven't really addressed what's actually happening on the ground, he's going to combine it all together and point to these very real and very powerful images of children sleeping on concrete slabs, perhaps, or we've got large numbers of people who are crammed into tight spaces. He might find a part of the wall where there's a ladder where people are climbing over, and he'll sort of combine it all into one big general immigration crisis unless he can stop it by building his wall. So clearly the president thinks that the solution to what he is characterizing as this generalized crisis

that combines undocumented immigrants crossing the border and the issue of those seeking asylum is to build the wall. But Congress does not support that, which is why we have a shutdown. So what would be accomplished, what could be accomplished by the president making a case in a primetime speech as he plans to do and then visiting the border? He could sell the country on this idea. He could sell his base in particular, and he could convince them to put pressure on their elected officials either to reopen the government or to support the idea of a national emergency. We can call a national emergency because of the security of our country.

Absolutely. No, we can do it. I haven't done it. I may do it. I may do it. But we can call a national emergency and build it very quickly. And it's another way of doing it. And what exactly would that look like? The president declaring, as he's talked about, a national emergency. Well, if he did that about, a national emergency. Well, if he did that, he would have access to the funds that he needs and access to the military to begin building this wall. And he would actually be able to point to a concrete accomplishment,

his really his central campaign promise. The problem is that there are rules. There's a federal law attached to this idea of a national emergency. And if he doesn't make the case strong enough, he'll be challenged in court. And again, if there isn't enough evidence to support this idea of a real national emergency, very quickly those funds are going to be taken away from him in the form of a court injunction. This is a very important battle to win from the standpoint of safety, number one, defining our country and who we are. Also, from the standpoint of dollars, this wall will pay for itself many times during the course of a year. The money we're talking

about is very small compared to the return. You think I like doing this? I don't like doing this. But we have no choice. We have to have it. So part of the reason why he will be giving this speech and visiting the border is to make a case directly to the voters and around Congress that there actually is a crisis, that it is a national emergency. Exactly. In many ways, this is Trump doing what Trump does. He doesn't follow the rules. He doesn't follow the template of how Washington works. He kind of does things his own way, and he talks directly to his base, and that's what he's seeking to do now. And if he succeeds in doing this, he could end up getting his wall built through a national

emergency declaration, and he will have done it without the approval of Congress. It's possible he could do that. Hmm. So in the end, and this is kind of fascinating, the president might be able to make the case successfully to the American public that there's a real crisis at the border. Because, in fact, at this point, there is one. It's just that he played a major role in creating it.

That's right. I mean, let's be clear. There are still a lot of hoops the president would have to jump through, the administration would have to jump through to get this wall built. But the really backward, surprising, surprises me as much as anybody else, thing about all this is that, yes, well, he's been talking about this crisis that doesn't exist. A real one emerged, one that he actually made worse. And somehow that's bolstering this argument he's been making since 2016. It's bolstering this argument he's been making since 2016. Caitlin, thank you very much. Thank you.

President Trump is scheduled to deliver his speech about the situation at the border at 9 p.m. tonight from the Oval Office and has asked all the major TV networks to preempt their primetime lineup to carry his address. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, in an attempt to limit the fallout from the government shutdown, the Trump administration directed the IRS to pay federal tax refunds to millions of Americans, despite the fact that the agency has lost its funding.

Under previous shutdowns, the IRS has been prohibited from issuing refunds. But this time, the White House is ordering IRS workers to return to work for the specific purpose of issuing the refunds. Despite that order, the Times reports that the IRS employees issuing the refunds will not be paid for their work until the shutdown is over. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.