RIGHT SPEAK: Stopping the Caravan

REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

Can we stop the caravan?

As Rod Dreher notes, the sight of thousands of Central Americans making their way en masse to the United States forces us to ask: “How far would we go to defend the sovereignty of our nations from invaders who want to cross our borders not with weapons to conquer, but nevertheless to settle here?”

The president’s threat to deploy the military to the border to stop the caravan conjures images of gunning down unarmed border infiltrators. This is precisely the kind of confrontation that some of the radicals cheering the caravan would love to see.

But this isn’t a military problem. It’s a law-enforcement problem, and one that ordinary civilian law enforcement can solve if provided with the right tools — which it does not have right now. The current rules regarding asylum and the treatment of alien minors, and the inadequate level of funding for detention of people applying for asylum (to make sure they can’t run off when their cases are rejected), effectively force immigration authorities into a catch-and-release policy, where aliens crossing the border are given a court date and then let go. This is a powerful incentive for more people to follow.

The incentive is so powerful that the current caravan is just the most photogenic part of the problem; fiscal-year 2018 statistics show that a slow-motion caravan confronts the border every day, with a daily average in September of more than 500 illegal aliens traveling in family units apprehended on the border (and soon released). Many others walk up to an immigration inspector at a legal crossing point on the Mexican border (“port of entry” is the technical term) and simply utter the magic word “asylum” and get in.