News reports that migrant children are being left to sleep on concrete or are stuck in vans while awaiting processing are appalling, but not surprising because of the chaos of a Trump administration policy that was put in place with "little or no planning for how it should be implemented," former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Tuesday.
"I used to tell our immigration enforcement personnel, be sensitive, one high profile case, or two high profile cases in the interior or at the border can undermine our mission," Johnson told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"Don't just think that your job is to go by the book...let's have some sensitivity to avoid having a one-year-old in ICE custody for nine days, separated from his or her grandmother. Let's have sensitivity in how we implement the rules."
According to an NBC report, migrant children are left sleeping on benches or at Border Patrol stations while Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for their shelter or reuniting them with family members works through its backlog. In another report, children were left waiting in vans for several hours because of botched reunification processes at one center.
"There are smart things we can do for border security," Johnson said. "This is a conversation that I had with my counterpart, to step up their border security on their southern border."
As a result, by August 2014, the immigration crisis at that time was nearly over.
"They kept that added security in place for at least the next year, but their budget was stretched to do so, and we saw the second-lowest number of apprehensions, so the Mexican government can help if we're willing to work with them."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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