Some Americans look to the border and see huddled masses of desperate mothers and fathers fleeing with their children from violence and destitution. Even asylum seekers who look for Border Patrol agents and turn themselves in and ask for protection are counted in official data as “apprehended,” suggesting, inaccurately, that they were caught trying to sneak into the United States. Should the situation with large numbers of people overwhelming Border Patrol stations be called a “crisis,” even if some of the chaos is self-imposed by the administration? In this case, “deployment” may have conjured images of chaos and danger along the border that don’t match up with reality, so we scrapped it. Likewise, President Trump’s favorite way of describing the process of detaining and then freeing migrants captured at the border — “catch and release,” he calls it.

Source: International New York Times May 09, 2019 18:57 UTC