Finally, after averting its eyes, the Left has found a reason to take an interest as Haitian migrants flood by the thousands across the Rio Grande into Texas. Naturally, what grabbed their attention is not the real issue, which is President Joe Biden triggering an irruption of illegal aliens by foolishly inviting them in and scrapping immigration policies that worked.
The thing that brought a new focus, and piqued outrage, was video footage of mounted officers trying to control the invasion. What detonated the Left’s anger and started another embarrassingly vapid round of hand-wringing is captured by a false report from Business Insider that wrote of “Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping at Haitian migrants.” Reuters described agents swinging what appeared to be whips or lariats.
Immediately, congressional militants swung into Twitter action. Rep. Rashida Tlaib deployed her signature combination of stupidity and vulgarity by commenting, “Cracking a f***ing whip on Haitians fleeing hardship shows you that this system simply can’t be reformed.” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar tweeted to much the same vacuous effect about poor migrants and horrid Americans.
Actually, the Border Protection officers didn’t have whips, let alone crack any. If there were any pictures of that happening, I feel sure we would have seen them. Nor did the officers use lariats. What were clearly pictured in their hands were horses’ reins. Mounted guards used their horses, as mounted police traditionally do — it’s what the horses are for — to move swiftly back and forth in front of the Haitian influx to keep migrants from coming ashore.
One guard swung the end of his reins round and round to deter a migrant from coming closer or attempting to dodge past the police line and into the country. He made no attempt to whip the man. If he had, one suspects that he would have managed it. But the fellow was untouched. When another migrant broke through, an officer (perhaps the same one) chased him down on horseback and grabbed him by the shirt, having first let go of the rein (not whip or lariat), which clearly dangled free and harmless.
In another clip, a guard shouted at a migrant and used words that were bad-tempered and rude. It was the sort of thing one often sees and hears on police bodycam footage when officers are working against the odds and under considerable stress — unpleasant but neither surprising nor remotely unforgivable.
In short, the officers were doing their jobs in tough circumstances and should be thanked and supported, not criticized or punished. But in America today, no one working diligently to enforce the law is supported by either the Left in general or by this administration. White House press secretary Jen Psaki commented, “I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.” Actually, many of us do.
But Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who as the officers’ ultimate boss should have their backs, instead told CNN, “One cannot weaponize a horse to aggressively attack a child … That is not acceptable … I was horrified by what I saw … The pictures that I observed troubled me profoundly.”
Profoundly, eh? I bet. There was nothing profound or even thoughtful about Mayorkas in his handling of this incident. He’s a hack bureaucrat dissociating himself from the actions of field-level staff whom he should be defending.
What we have watched in this little flare-up is a sequence of events that is repeated again and again to the deliberate detriment of our nation. Law enforcement officers are forced into unprecedentedly tough situations by politicians and try their darndest to do their jobs under the hostile scrutiny of left-leaning critics and media bent on attacking and undermining them. Inevitably, a fraught scene is videoed that can be maliciously distorted by people who know nothing of what law enforcement requires. And then the topmost donkeys in Washington make groveling appearances on cable TV and betray the lions they command and who are doing the hard and thankless work. The inevitability and disingenuousness of it all make one’s gorge rise.
I cannot leave the ridiculous coverage of these border encounters without mentioning a particularly absurd grace note from Reuters. In a sentence mentioning an officer “unfurling a cord resembling a lariat, which he swung near a migrant’s face,” the story mentions that officers were “wearing cowboy hats.” Cowboy hats? Those weren’t cowboy hats but standard wide-brimmed hats that Western riders commonly wear in the saddle, regardless of whether they are rounding up steers. The hats were part of the Border Protection riders’ uniform. Reuters just couldn’t resist the temptation of a cliché, and this casts light on the worth of its account and on other reports, too. We’ve been treated again to a narrative, a prejudiced story, not news.
I will look in future Reuters reports about the U.S. Forest Service and expect to read that the agency’s employees wear Smokey The Bear hats.
