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‘CHAOS AND DISORDER’ AT THE BORDER. This newsletter is based on a longer story I just published at the Washington Examiner with the headline “The border is even worse than you think.” Indeed, it is. You can read the complete version here. But here’s the gist of it:
On Thursday and Friday, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise led a group of ten GOP lawmakers on a fact-finding trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. I went along to report on it. The group went to McAllen, Texas, which has a heavy influx of illegal border crossers and is near the now-notorious Donna detention center, where thousands of illegal crossers are being held in overcrowded conditions.
Here’s the bottom line from what the lawmakers discovered about the government’s response to the surge: It is entirely improvised. Jury-rigged. Thrown together in a scramble to accommodate thousands of migrants who were not coming just months ago. And the reason it is being improvised is that during his first days in office, President Joe Biden blew up the foundation of the government’s handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children.
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The lawmakers went to Anzalduas International Bridge that connects Mexico to the United States. Under the bridge, U.S. officials have put together a makeshift center for processing migrants. The bridge is about a mile away from a spot on the Rio Grande river where migrants arrive 24-7. The most traffic is at night, so the lawmakers visited at about 11 p.m. There they saw hundreds of migrants who had just recently walked up from the riverbank — dirty, exhausted, and confused. After hours of sitting around under the bridge, they were taken to the Donna center.
At Donna, the Republicans were stunned by what they saw. “It’s far worse than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be pretty bad,” said Republican Rep. Devin Nunes. From Rep. French Hill: “You’re in a pod of children that is supposed to hold 60 that has 350 in it, head-to-toe, in space blankets.”
The lawmakers also looked at the State of Texas’s efforts to secure the border. A huge part of the federal Border Patrol’s staff and energy is going to simply accommodating the flow of migrants. They’ve been taken away from actually patrolling the border. So Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has come up with what he calls Operation Lone Star to have state law enforcement fill in the gaps. The effort helps, but it can’t fix the fact that the Biden administration is misusing the Border Patrol as a social welfare organization.
The Republicans pointed to several things Biden has done to create the current crisis. First, he did away with President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which required asylum seekers to stay in Mexico, not in the United States, while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
Second, Biden ended Trump’s asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — to steer would-be asylum seekers from those nations into safe countries other than the U.S.
Third, Biden gutted Trump’s use of Title 42, the government’s authority to expel most migrants for the purpose of controlling the spread of COVID. Biden did not throw Title 42 away altogether but is by some accounts now letting most would-be migrants stay rather than be turned away because of the pandemic.
Fourth, Biden came into office promising to end all deportations for the first 100 days of his presidency. With very few exceptions, he has done just that.
Fifth, Biden stopped construction of the Trump border wall. All of these moves opened the door to would-be illegal crossers and also sent the message to thousands of people in the Northern Triangle and elsewhere: Come now, and you can stay.
The Republicans ended their trip with an appeal to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris: Come to the border. Take an actual, personal look at the situation your policies have created. “What I saw on this trip was chaos and disorder,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. “What the Biden administration does not want you to know is simply that they have handed over the borders of our country to the cartels and smugglers.”
More on the story here.
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