What is Joe Biden Doing to Cope with a Rise in Unaccompanied Child Migrants?

Joe Biden’s promise of a more “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system is facing an early test as the number of children seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border has increased this year.

Precisely because the process of getting children to sponsors is not moving quickly enough. The Biden administration has taken steps to improve its efficiency, and other changes are rumored to be on the way, but it is also inheriting the changes Trump made to shrink shrink asylum and refugee processing.

Leah Chavla, a senior policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said: “What we saw under the last administration was, yes, there were times when there were a lot of unaccompanied children in government custody and those were really due to policies that were cruel and awful and on purpose. It wasn’t because the system couldn’t process the children.”