Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said the Biden administration inherited “a broken system at the border” as the number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. has steadily increased in recent weeks.
“What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest,” Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
She called the unaccompanied children crossing the border a “humanitarian challenge to all of us.”
Pelosi expressed support for the president’s decision to deploy the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the border.
“I’m so pleased that the president, as a temporary measure, has sent FEMA to the border in order to help facilitate the children going from … the 72-hour issue into where they are cared for as they are transferred into family homes or homes that are safe for them to be,” Pelosi said.
She called the actions a “transition for what went wrong before to what is right,” adding that “there are certain responsibilities that we must honor.”
“We have to have a system that accommodates that, and that is what the Biden administration is in the process of doing,” Pelosi said.
On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security called on FEMA to support a governmentwide effort for the next 90 days “to safely receive, shelter, and transfer unaccompanied children who make the dangerous journey to the U.S. southwest border,” a statement from the department reads.