WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Sunday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke on the currently escalating crisis of illegal immigrants and unaccompanied minors at the United States’ southern border, but blamed the situation on a “broken system” inherited from the previous Trump Administration during an interview with ABC News’ “This Week.”
“The facts are these: there are more children. About 600, 700 more children, unaccompanied children coming over the border. This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi said. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest.”
Pelosi also claimed that climate change was another factor driving the increase in border crossings recently.
“My most recent trip to the Northern Triangle, that would be Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, you saw the impact of the climate change, mind you,” she said. “These people were leaving because of the drought. They couldn’t farm and they were seeking other ways to survive.”
Republicans have blamed the Biden Administration for the surge in migrants attempting to cross the southern U.S. border due to the fact that multiple policies implemented by the former Trump Administration have been ended, including Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) which kept migrants in Mexico while their hearings were pending, admitting registered asylum seekers, as well as decreasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) priorities for arrests and deportations.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, while being interviewed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday, said that the policies of the Biden Administration are “empirically, entirely” to blame for the increase in unaccompanied minors showing up at the border.
“When people think they can get in, they begin sending their unaccompanied child on a train ride across Mexico, where she may be kidnapped and trafficked,” Cassidy said. “There can be no equivocations when it comes to someone who is thinking of joining a caravan.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, over 100,000 people were caught attempting to cross the southern border – including 29,000 unaccompanied minors – in February.
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