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Three completely different border realities were displayed Thursday.
► There’s the Donald Trump reality, where President Joe Biden is to blame and a military force is needed to shut the border, control an invasion of “murderers,” round up the undocumented and expel them from the US.
► There’s the Biden reality, where Trump is to blame for killing a bipartisan compromise that would have given all presidents new powers to control the influx of migrants and streamline a broken asylum process.
► And there’s the lived reality of children and families facing hunger and hypothermia in open-air camps along the border.
That grim picture was presented in court filings related to the camps near the US-Mexico border in California, which seek to force the federal government to better protect the well-being of people who are waiting to make asylum claims. Read CNN’s report, which includes images of a girl in a cast deposited at an open-air camp and a woman trapped in the slats of border fencing.
The 3.3 million case backlog of asylum claims is one of the main problems of the current immigration policy crisis, and the bipartisan bill would have sought to address it by adding workers at the border and beefing up the immigration court system. The fact that people can live in the US for years before their asylum claim is ultimately heard has been cited as a reason that so many continue to make the dangerous journey.
Don’t expect to hear anything from the migrant perspective from Trump, who visited the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday. He is promising a drastic deportation effort.
“I will carry out the largest domestic…
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