Scarborough: Southern Border Bigger Electoral Issue than Afghanistan

Scarborough: Southern Border Bigger Electoral Issue than Afghanistan

Based on an exclusive report by Axios that found the “U.S. government has lost contact with thousands of migrant children released from its custody”, Joe Scarborough, the co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, stated that the situation at the Southern Border will become a bigger issue in next year’s midterm elections than Afghanistan.

“The Southern Border will play a much larger role in next year’s midterms than Afghanistan. The situation seems to be getting more chaotic by the day. The President should appoint Jeh Johnson and Jeb Bush to bring order to the situation and end the humanitarian crisis there,” tweeted Scarborough.

The Axios report based on data from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request found that roughly one-in-three calls made to released migrant kids or their sponsors between January and May went unanswered, raising questions about the government’s ability to protect minors after they’re released to family members or others in the U.S.

“This is very dismaying,” said Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the unaccompanied minors program during the Obama administration and was briefed on Axios’ findings. “If large numbers of children and sponsors aren’t being reached, that’s a very big gap in efforts to help them.”

The numbers indicate that during the first five months of the year, care providers made 14,600 required calls to check in with migrant minors released from shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. These minors typically were taken in by relatives or other vetted sponsors.

In 4,890 of those instances, workers were unable to reach either the migrant or the sponsor. The percentage of unsuccessful calls grew, from 26% in January to 37% in May, the data provided to Axios showed.

Read full Axios report here.

6 Responses to "Scarborough: Southern Border Bigger Electoral Issue than Afghanistan"

  1. First, one should separate the two issues in terms of existential threats to the USA vs. political liabilities to elected officials. IMHO, our functionally unregulated southern border offers a greater and more measurable existential threat to the USA than the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is difficult to quantify and qualify the existential threat imparted by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan because it has a myriad of international affairs and diplomacy implications. Afghanistan may be a huge political threat to the Ds, though. It is not hard to quantify or qualify the threat of utterly abandoning immigration laws. Whether voters realize the southern border could be the undoing of the USA, or not, is another question. GOP could have fixed immigration laws when they were in control of Congress and the White House, and they chose not to, which reinforces that on some issues, the political parties are two wings of the same bird.

    These policy and performance issues are all subject to polling, and whichever polls the highest (as in the issues that is most damaging to a candidate), are the issue that will be the biggest in the election, because that is where the dollars will be directed. This is the science part of political science.

  2. LOL Edward someone on the staff of TR must have been laid over in an airport with a dead cell phone battery.
    Thats the only way a normal person would have ever seen the Joe and Mika’s show!!

  3. So a criminal cartel expands it business plan to smuggle children as well as drugs into the country through an open border and someone is surprised that nearly 40% of the “vetted sponsors” cannot be reached for follow up on the kids?

  4. This Worthless President needs to CLOSE the Border and FINISH the WALL and Deport all those here illegally………………….you know, like TRUMP was doing.

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