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BIDEN’S BORDER BALONEY. The administration sent Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Sunday shows with an impossible job — to defend President Biden’s policies that have led to a massive rush of illegal crossers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mayorkas’ assignment was to make a simple — and false — declaration. “The border is closed,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” “The border is closed,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The border is closed,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
It was a preposterous statement. Everyone knows the Biden administration is struggling to find places to accommodate the more than 15,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally in the last few weeks. The administration is keeping the young people in jails, in tents, in hotel rooms. Axios reported Sunday that the administration “has awarded an $86 million contract for hotel rooms near the border to hold around 1,200 migrant family members who cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
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So the border is not closed. How can a border be closed when the government is scrambling to house all the people it is letting across? It’s amazing Mayorkas could say it with a straight face. Remember that even he, Mayorkas himself, said in a statement just four days earlier, “We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.”
But the Biden border baloney didn’t stop there. Mayorkas also sought to blame the Trump administration for the border mess. Specifically, he pointed to former President Trump’s decision to eliminate the Central American Minors program started by President Obama.
“President Trump dismantled the orderly, humane and efficient way of allowing children to make their claims under United States law in their home countries,” Mayorkas told NBC. “He dismantled the Central American Minors program. So we are rebuilding those orderly and safe processes as quickly as possible.”
That is utter malarkey, as the president might say. Yes, Trump killed the Central American Minors program. But the program never dealt with, and was never intended to deal with, the kind of border frenzy that is happening now. Its intended purpose was to help Central American children come to the United States with refugee status if they already had a parent who was in the U.S. legally. That is not the situation of most of the illegal crossers today.
The Biden State Department announced on March 10 that it was restarting the Central American Minors program. Right in the announcement, the administration said the program will “reunite qualified children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras with their parent or parents who are lawfully present in the United States.” Note the word “lawfully.”
Critics point out that the original Central American Minors program was designed to let in children whose parents were not permanent residents of the United States, or legal immigrants, but who had gotten in through what is called “Temporary Protected Status” — that is, they were admitted on a short term basis because of natural disasters or disease or some other catastrophe in their homeland. “The largest group of TPS recipients is from El Salvador (195,000 people) followed by Honduras (57,000) people and Haiti (50,000 people),” according to the American Friends Service Committee. Other countries with citizens in the program are Nepal, Syria, Nicaragua, Yemen, and more.
The Obama administration was always seeking to make that “temporary” status permanent. The Central American Minors program was a way to do that, by bringing the children of those already lawfully — but temporarily — in the country. If any of those parents had had legal immigrant status in the U.S., they wouldn’t have needed the program — they could bring their children to the United States as legal immigrants.
In the end, the Central American Minors program brought about 3,000 children to the United States. Some qualified under the program, and some were just let in by the Obama administration even though they were not qualified. In any event, it wasn’t a very big program. It was, in fact, very limited.
And for that reason, the Trump administration’s cancellation of the program is not the cause of today’s rush to the border, no matter what Secretary Mayorkas said. “The current influx, and the 2019 influx, have nothing to do with ending the Central American Minors program,” says Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors tighter immigration controls. “There have been well over 100,000 unaccompanied children in the last seven years or so. Only about half of them have been joining parents. They also come to join siblings, grandparents, friends, and even fellow gang members in some cases. Ending the Central American Minors program did not cause this surge, and re-starting it will not end the surge. If anything, it might make it worse.”
Even with all that, Mayorkas’ most preposterous statement might have been one last denial — his denial that the current border crisis, which he, of course, will not admit is a crisis, is the work of the new Biden administration. “Mr. Secretary, do you not see a connection between the surge at the border and the policy changes that Joe Biden has made in his first two months?” asked “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace. “Chris, I do not,” Mayorkas said.
He’s the only one, or at least the only one outside the Biden administration, who fails to see a connection that is clear as day. Mayorkas’ Sunday show performance was another self-created mess for the new White House. Given the team’s record so far, there will likely be many more.
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