As Governor Kim Reynolds recently joined 19 governors across the U.S. to call for the White House Administration to take action at the country’s southern border and criticised the administration for asking states to house migrant children, a local organization asks the public to look more closely at what has been happening at the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Control has noted that the number of encounters has continued to increase since April of 2020, and in the last five years the largest number of enforcement actions occurred in fiscal year 2019, with 1,148,024, which nearly doubled the numbers of 2017 to 2020. This year is shaping up to be as large as 2019 with 871,459 this fiscal year to date. Washington resident E. Rosalie Li-Rodenborn is a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and serves as an ally for Latinos for Washington, Inc. She disagrees with Governor Kim Reynolds’ statement that the number of immigrant children in need of aid is “the president’s problem.”
Instead of pointing a finger at President Biden or at President Trump in 2019, Li-Rodenborn says the country’s immigration policies should be the focus, and the issues occurring in Central and South America such as violence, natural disasters, food insecurity, and poverty, “What does cause people to come here is of course what is happening in South America and so there was a lot of depression in migration in 2020 because of the pandemic and then we also see in 2019 the exact same location where you see that spike with the warm weather. So this was just very foreseeable.”
Li-Rodenborn adds that it wasn’t until January 15th, a few days before the end of the Trump administration that former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar issued a request for assistance in expanding shelter space for migrant children. As Iowa has a history of aiding refugees in the past, she hopes people can look more closely at the plights of children that are seeking to enter the U.S., “I think we need to be really fair about the conversation, evidence based, and not, I think in these conversations we really quickly devolve into making assumptions about what people want and their motivations and I think that’s not fruitful.”
Encounters of unaccompanied children along the southwest border dropped by 12% in April, and the average number of children in CBP custody has decreased from 4,109 in March to 2,895 in April, with 455 in custody on May 11th.