The policies of the Trump administration are to blame for the current surge of unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News’ "This Week."
"This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us," the California Democrat said. "What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border and they are working to correct that in the children's interests."
Pelosi emphasized that the Biden administration is carrying out "a transition from what was wrong before to what is right."
One such change in policy, Pelosi said, is a government-wide effort to facilitate the transfer of migrant children from border care facilities and into safe homes, as announced by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the weekend.
Pelosi also pointed out that there are efforts to help Central American nations deal with the various problems that largely drive migrants to leave those countries and seek a new life in the United States.
The House speaker also stressed that the U.S. has responsibilities it must honor, such as upholding the standards of the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program rather than utilizing what the Biden administration considers to be Trump’s "cruel" approach.
The number of unaccompanied children and family units in custody has tripled in recent weeks, with more than 100,000 migrant encounters in February alone, a dramatic rise that immediately followed Biden’s inauguration and his first executive order halting the southern border wall construction, Fox News reported.
Republicans have been portraying the Biden administration as weak on immigration, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy writing a letter to the president earlier this month that he felt "compelled to express great concern with the manner in which your administration is approaching this crisis" and added that he had "hope that we can work together to solve it," CNBC reported.
Former President Donald Trump has harshly criticized President Joe Biden's handling of the crisis, saying last week that the country is being "destroyed" by the recent surge of illegal migrants at the border, according to Fox News.
Trump said in a statement he released that the U.S.-Mexico border during his administration was "in great shape" and was "stronger, safer, and more secure than ever before," adding that the construction of the border wall "would have easily" been finished if Democrats had not tried to constantly stall the project.
"We ended Catch-and-Release, shut down asylum fraud, and crippled the vicious smugglers, drug dealers, and human traffickers," Trump said. "The wall, despite horrendous Democratic delays, would have easily been finished by now, and is working magnificently."