US President Donald Trump is strongly defending the US’ use of tear gas at the Mexican border to repel a crowd of migrants that included angry rock-throwers but also barefoot, crying children.
Critics denounced the border agents’ action as overkill, but Trump kept a hard line.
“They were being rushed by some very tough people and they used tear gas. Here’s the bottom line: Nobody is coming into our country unless they come in legally.”Donald Trump, US President
At a roundtable in Mississippi later Monday, 27 November, Trump seemed to acknowledge that children were affected, asking, "Why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it’s going to be formed and they were running up with a child?"
He said it was "a very minor form of the tear gas itself" that he assured was "very safe."
On Monday, he went as far as to say that the US will close the border “permanently if need be”.
Without offering evidence, he also claimed that some of the women are not really parents but are instead "grabbers" who steal children so they have a better chance of being granted asylum in the US.
Competing Narratives
The showdown at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing has thrown into sharp relief two competing narratives about the caravan of migrants hoping to apply for asylum but stuck on the Mexican side of the border. Trump portrays them as a threat to US national security, intent on exploiting America's asylum laws, but others insist he is exaggerating the threat to stoke fear and achieve his political goals.
The sheer size of the caravan makes it unusual.
"I think it's so unprecedented that everyone is hanging their own fears and political agendas on the caravan," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies immigration. "You can call it scary, you can call it hopeful, you can call it a sign of human misery. You can hang whatever angle you want to on it."
Trump rails against migrant caravans as dangerous groups of mostly single men.
That view featured heavily in his speeches during the midterm election campaign when several were hundreds of miles away, traveling on foot. Officials have said some 500 members are criminals, but haven’t backed that up with details on why they think so.
Mario Figueroa – Tijuana's social services department director who is overseeing operations at the sports complex where most of the migrants in the caravan are staying – said as of Friday that of the 4,938 staying there, 933 were women, 889 were children and 3,105 were men, which includes fathers traveling with families along with single men.
The US military said Monday that about 300 troops who had been deployed in south Texas and Arizona as part of a border security mission have been moved to California for similar work. The military's role is limited largely to erecting barriers along the border and providing transportation and logistical support to Customs and Border Protection.
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