Is the Biden Administration Guilty of Migrant Hoarding?

Today’s excellent blog post is by guest author Susan Sobaky.

Is the Biden Administration guilty of migrant hoarding?

As an animal lover and advocate, I can usually find an animal analogy for most human situations and behaviors. In the case of the crisis President Biden has created at the southern border I can only compare it to the same behavior that results in animal hoarding. So I will call it migrant hoarding. Please note, I am talking about behavior; I am not comparing people to animals.

Let’s look at a definition of animal hoarding:

“An animal hoarder is defined as someone who has accumulated a large number of animals and who: 1) fails to provide minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, and veterinary care; 2) fails to act on the deteriorating condition of the animals (including disease, starvation or death) and the environment (severe overcrowding, extremely unsanitary conditions); and often, 3) is unaware of the negative effects of the collection on their own health and well-being and on that of other family members.”

Frost RO, Steketee G, Williams L. Hoarding: A community health problem. Health Soc Care Comm. 2000;8:229–234.

To characterize what is happening at the border we could define it as migrant hoarding and use the above definition, just exchanging the word “migrant” for “animal,” change “veterinary care” to “medical care,” and change in 3) "other family members" to "the entire country."

Not convinced? Let’s look at some pictures (taken from Google Images).

These 2 are animal hoarding situations:

These 2 are migrant conditions at the border:

Animal hoarding generally starts with good intentions. As stated on the ASPCA website, “Animal hoarders often appear intelligent and clearly believe they are helping their animals. In addition, many hoarders possess the ability to garner sympathy and to deceive others into thinking their situation is under control. They often are blind to the fact that their animals are suffering under their care.”

Hoarding, whether animal or migrant, may start as the caring, humane thing to do but in both cases can get out of control quickly. I think the Biden administration thinks they are doing the humane thing by continuing to let thousands of migrants into the United States, and they are trying to deceive us into thinking the situation is not a crisis and they have it under control. They have lost sight of the potential damage this action is doing, not only to the migrants, but to the citizens of the United States, not to mention the billions of dollars in cost and resources.

An animal hoarder could be arrested and charged, potentially with animal cruelty or abuse. They could go to jail or pay a hefty fine. As I consider the similarities of animal hoarding with what is happening at the border, migrant hoarding, I wonder how is the Biden administration getting away with it?