Mort Rosenblum: Trump prefers exploiting human suffering to real border solutions

and analysis of the writer:

During a catastrophic Somalia famine in the 1990s, Fred Cuny looked up at huge circling U.S. Air Force transports. “Whenever you see those C-130s,” he told me, fuming, “you know someone (fouled) up.” His real quote is unsuited to a family paper.

He was the global go-to disaster expert back then, a Texan often on contract to the U.S. government. His sound advice to avert costly ineffectual emergencies was too often ignored by politicians whose purposes were more personal than humanitarian.

If still around today, Cuny would likely have an aneurism at Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

“Yesterday, Mexico accepted a record 4 deportation flights in 1 day!”, the new press secretary tweeted last week, cheering her boss’s success. Trump also strong-armed Colombia’s president into accepting two C-17 flights he had refused on principle.

A C-17 carries 80 tons, three times more than a C-130. Each had 80 deportees aboard. By rough estimate, a 12-hour return flight came to $10,000 a person. Civilian charters to Colombia, far cheaper, would make for tepid photo ops. As would bus trips to Mexico.

But cost is the least of it.

There is no sudden emergency at the southern border. It is a failure of logistics and resource, clearly foreseeable. Yet Trump, who bears the most responsibility for it, exploited human suffering to con voters into putting him back in office.

As a result, much of a scornful world now sees Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty with bitter irony. Remember?

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In a different world today, America cannot possibly take in all those wretched masses. Nor can it refuse them all with cruel contempt, not only because of human decency and international law but also because its economy badly needs millions of them.

All countries need border controls. Asylum seekers have a long-established right to a hearing. Migrants without entry papers or a credible threat at home must be refused entry. But Trump’s blanket blood libel of desperate families feeds global upheaval.

Cuny’s first humanitarian work was as a young college graduate on the border at Eagle Pass, Texas. He was mysteriously killed in Chechnya, in 1995, likely by Russian agents who were more interested in taking lives than saving them.

By then, his methodic approach to sorting out implacable crises was legend. He knew most disasters were manmade and fixable, if not preventable, by getting the right people to do the right thing.

The first Gulf War that ended in 1991 was a standout example. Marc Grossman, deputy chief of mission at U.S. embassy in Turkey, explained in a report how Operation Provide Comfort established a safe zone in northern Iraq:

“Just as Fred Cuny had predicted, 500,000 people went home. It was astonishing because plan B had been to set up nine or 10 massive refugee camps all along a valley … Many people said that if that were the outcome, these would be the next Palestinians. Instead, the Kurds went home.”

That same principle suggests the solution on the southern border, which most experts who understand the challenge now propose.

First, a grasp of basic realities.

Fentanyl, which Trump constantly evokes, is mostly smuggled by Americans at ports of entry. Cartels export drugs and contraband via tunnels under that vaunted wall, if not by aircraft to remote landing strips or on boats. It is not a “migrant” problem.

Border patrols with electronic surveillance catch many illegal crossers. Many others elude them. But poor people forced to face hostile desert can’t carry enough water, let alone drugs, and they seldom risk arrest by breaking the law.

The Democrats’ “open border” is a Trumpian big lie. Barack Obama deported more illegal immigrants than he did. Today’s crisis began in 2016 when Trump ranted about Mexican “rapists and murders” and called for a Muslim ban.

He slashed immigrant quotas. His aides thwarted his worst ideas: To shoot migrants in the leg and dig alligator-filled moats. Still, he separated children from parents with deliberate cruelty. When Covid struck, he used Title 42 to bar entry as health threats.

In 2020, Biden applied more humane policies, and a huge backup besieged the border. Families fled gang violence, harsh governments and crop failures. Overwhelmed facilities forced many to be released while awaiting future court hearings.

Biden’s online application system substantially cut the backlog. Trump just killed that with an executive order. During the campaign, he ordered cowed Republicans to block a bipartisan border bill so he could run on a phony “national emergency.”

Studies show migrants commit fewer crimes than the general population. But when a Venezuelan thug viciously murdered Laken Riley, a student in Georgia, in 2024, Trump made him an icon for mostly blameless multiple millions taking a shot at a better life.

Here is my guess at what Cuny would recommend today:

- A substantial increase in magistrates would assess credible threats quickly at ports of entry. Temporary nearby shelters would provide families with food, medical care and security rather than forcing them to stay in Mexico at risk of robbery or worse.

- Migrant families without a case to make would be sent back across the border, according to common international practice. Asylum seekers would be allowed in for further screening.

- More well-trained border agents with aerial surveillance would stop more illegal crossers and, if necessary, provide humanitarian aid before expulsion.

But with the world as it is, people come from halfway around the world to take their chances. The United States needs a comprehensive reform with clear rules.

Higher quotas would admit far more immigrants to do essential jobs many Americans reject or to create enterprises that hire U.S. citizens. Targeted foreign aid would help migrants stay home where most would rather be.

The New York Times on Thursday exemplified the worst-case status quo on its front page.

A military transport taking 88 deportees to Brazil, cuffed and shackled, was stuck in the sweltering Amazon for hours with no air conditioning. Children wailed. Adults fainted. U.S. agents blocked exits until some stormed the emergency exits and shouted for help.

Eventually, a Brazilian plane took them the rest of the way. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was livid and denounced inhumane treatment in terms that echoed around the world.

Trump says he is simply making America great by taking out unwanted trash. Many cheer him on. People are entitled to their opinions. But the overriding fact is that the cost to America — not measured in money — is beyond calculation.