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The White House has responded to claims that it is caging children of migrants 2 years after the Trump border separation scandal. The White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the administration from allegations it has continued a similar detention policy that was much maligned by Democrats under the ex-president. The Biden administration has just reopened an emergency facility for migrant children in Carrizo Springs, Texas, because of the extra space needed to observe Covid-19 protocols. It will hold 700 youngsters between the age of 13 and 17. Psaki defended the move from allegations of hypocrisy when asked by Peter Doocy of Fox News if it was just a case of kids in containers rather than kids in cages. Psaki rejected to accept the comparison between the Biden administration’s approach to that of Donald Trump, which sparked widespread outrage.

On Wednesday, Psaki said, “We have a number of unaccompanied minors, children who are coming into the country without their families. What we are not doing, what the last administration did, was separate those kids, rip them from the arms of their parents at the border.  We are not doing that, that is immoral and is not the approach of this administration”. She also explained that the administration had a narrow range of options to deal with the issue and needed to quickly move children from Customs and Border Patrol detention to Department of Health and Human Services facilities. Psaki said, “We can send them back home and do a dangerous journey back, we are not doing that either, that is also putting them at risk. We can quickly transfer them from CBP to these HHS-run facilities. Or we can put them with families and sponsors without any vetting, there were some problems that that process ran into as well”.

Psaki added, “This facility in Texas that has been reopened has been revamped, there are teachers, there are medical facilities, and our objective is to move these kids quickly from there to vetted, sponsored families and to places where they can safely be. This is a difficult situation and a difficult choice, that’s the choice we have made”.  She said that some children had been delayed because of the record-breaking cold snap in Texas that had knocked out power to some facilities. And she pushed back on a tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that attacked the Biden administration for opening the new facility. Psaki said, “I have not seen the full context of the tweet that she shared, but the difficulty is what I outlined earlier. We have kids coming across borders, it is heartbreaking, I think we as human beings are heartbroken and as parents, as mothers and fathers too.