Encouraging illegal immigration is not compassionate; it’s dangerous

Another child has died while in government custody at the border, and yet again, the open-borders crowd is using the death to score political points against the Trump administration.

In this most recent tragedy, an eight-year-old boy from Guatemala died early Christmas day at a New Mexico hospital, after a Border Patrol agent noticed that he and his father looked ill. According to a DHS spokesman on Wednesday, the father declined further medical care for the son after the boy was initially discharged from a hospital, but later became more ill.

Earlier this month, a seven-year-old girl from Honduras died in custody after she and her father were apprehended trying to illegally cross the southern border.

Both deaths are being used by left-wing politicians to attack the Trump administration and others in favor of more by-the-book immigration enforcement — regardless of the facts.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, attacked president Trump over the incident:

Representative-elect Xochitl Torres Small, D-N.M., called for an investigation into the matter:

Many people die trying to get to and across America’s southern border. The elements can be unforgiving. People drown trying to cross rivers; they dehydrate in the desert. A recent government report counts 281 migrant deaths in the 2018 budget year. The story about the report does not say how many were children.

“The tragic reality is that our ‘compassionate’ policies incentivizing these people to make the journey are ensuring that they experience more violence on the way than they would in their home countries,” writes CR’s Daniel Horowitz. “According to a report by Doctors Without Borders, 68.3 percent of the migrants trying to enter the U.S. report being victims of violence on their journey, while ‘nearly 1/3 of the women were sexually abused during their journey.’”

In fact, things are so dangerous for those seeking to cross illegally that the DHS actually has a special operations division that regularly does medical search and rescue missions along the southern border. It’s called Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR).

Most recently, BORSTAR aided in the rescue of a caravan migrant who fell down a ravine on a particularly dangerous part of the border and was abandoned by her fellow travelers. She was taken to a hospital after her rescue.

One could, of course, make the argument that a much safer route would be to follow the law by applying for asylum at a legal port of entry or simply seeking to immigrate legally through the standard process. Waiting in line and dealing with paperwork might not be pleasant, but they’re certainly a lot safer than taking children across a desert.

But those who would rather live with this status quo than work with Republicans to make meaningful reforms to better enforce immigration laws only seem bothered when the government fails to save someone’s life after apprehension.

How compassionate.

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