Perspectives: Texas Holding Facility for Immigrant Teens Reopens

President Joe Biden’s administration has reopened a tent facility to house up to 700 immigrant teenagers after they cross the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied by a parent, a sign of growing worries about how children are treated in government custody.

U.S. Health and Human Services said Monday that the first teens arrived at Carrizo Springs, Texas, which was converted two years ago into a holding facility under former President Donald Trump. The facility has been closed since July 2019.

Two years ago, Carrizo Springs had a large tent serving as a...

For as long as former president Donald Trump’s highly controversial policies on children at the U.S.-Mexico border have been at issue, there have been allegations of hypocrisy leveled against critics of those policies. Democrats accused Trump of putting “kids in cages,” so Trump and his defenders pointed out that the chain-link partitions were built by the Obama administration. Democrats decried the separation of children from their families, so Trump defenders pointed out this happened sometimes under Barack Obama, too.

Both of those allegations of hypocrisy were vastly oversimplified. As The...