The Biden administration refuses to call it a crisis, but the facts at the border suggest otherwise. Customs and Border Protection encountered almost 19,000 family members and over 9,000 unaccompanied minors in February, a surge of unvaccinated that has overwhelmed the immigration system during a pandemic. The Biden administration is denying reporters access to facilities they were once free to visit. But photos, such as the ones published by Axios, have leaked out. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the Sunday talk show rounds, defending a policy under increasing scrutiny.
“The message is quite clear: Do not come. The border is closed. The border is secure. We are expelling families. We are expelling single adults under the CDC’s authority,” said Mayorkas.
Mayorkas went further, blaming the surge on the Trump administration, saying, “The entire system under United States law that has been in place throughout administrations of both parties was dismantled in its entirety by the Trump administration.”
That drew a swift rebuke from the former president, who said, “All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of just a few weeks, the Biden administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster.”
Other Republicans pounced.
Sen. Tom Cotton said, “The border is wide open. There are reports now that Customs and Border Patrol might be directed, simply start processing people in the country without even giving them a notice to appear in court. And of course, all of these bogus asylum claims are taking up so much manpower and resources at the border, that means that we also have other threats like increases in Fentanyl and other kinds of drug trafficking or persons on the terrorist watchlist crossing into our border.”
While President Biden is promising to visit the border, Republican leaders already have, using the crisis not just to force policy changes but to rain on Biden’s victory lap following passage of the American Rescue Plan.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “We went through a new facility that was built just more than a year ago. They built it with a capacity they thought they could never meet 1,040 people to be processed. Today broke that record. Today, they’re beyond capacity … Even though the U.S. Congress just passed a $1.9 trillion bill, not $1 in there to help.”
Now, the administration is busing migrants in overcrowded border facilities, most of them untested for COVID-19, to other parts of the country, as far as Montana and other northern border states. That is provoking another backlash. Last week, the CEO of Greyhound bus lines demanded that the Biden administration test asylum-seekers for COVID-19 before boarding buses.
Greyhound’s concern has proved entirely legitimate. In the first week of March, the Washington Examiner reported that Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, revealed that 108 people who had been released by the Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas, tested positive for COVID-19.
