In yet another hysterical attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, immigration reporter Dara Lind claims in the New York Times that DeSantis’s Martha’s Vineyard migrant flight “wasn’t meant as a policy critique” because DeSantis failed “to articulate what America ought to be doing on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
This is, of course, completely false. DeSantis’s migrant flight absolutely was a policy critique of the Biden administration, and DeSantis named a very specific policy that would immediately solve the border crisis that President Joe Biden created.
“I think that what we’ve been able to do is show that this border is a disaster,” DeSantis told Sean Hannity. “Biden has failed on this as much or more than on any other policy. And now, people are talking about it. And we want solutions as Americans. We want to make sure that Trump’s policy of Remain in Mexico can be reinstituted so we can get control over what is going on down there.”
In Lind’s entire op-ed, she never once mentions the existence of Remain in Mexico, let alone identifies it as the policy solution that Republicans have named that will fix the border crisis.
To Lind’s credit, she does admit that the current Biden policy of telling immigrants “that now is not the time to migrate to the United States” is a complete failure. As Lind correctly notes, immigrants know Biden has created an open border because their friends and family members in the United States tell them the truth.
“The ‘don’t come’ message is impotent because it gets mixed up with word of mouth: from migrants already in the United States, gossipy neighbors, opportunistic smugglers. The whisper network can convey when people are safe in the United States — the hawks are right about that,” Lind writes.
The hawks are right about way more than that. Lind later notes that “large-scale asylum-seeking started to outstrip government capacity during the Obama administration,” but she never even tries to explain why asylum-seeking suddenly rose under President Barack Obama.
The hawks know why: because immigrants learned that if they were arrested with children on the southern border, instead of being returned to Mexico, they would be quickly released into the U.S.
It is this catch-and-release policy, and not any other reason, that is causing the current border crisis.
That is why when Trump created the Remain in Mexico policy, which forces immigrants to stay in Mexico while their asylum claims are adjudicated, the number of immigrants coming to the southern border fell rapidly and stayed low. It only took 70,000 immigrants to be denied entry through the Remain in Mexico policy for the message to get back to immigrants everywhere that now was not the time to come.
Venezuela did not suddenly become a terrible place to live the day Biden took office. It’s been a socialist hell hole for a decade now. And Cuba has been a socialist hell hole for decades. The vast majority of these immigrants were living safely in third countries such as Peru until Biden became president. They are only coming here now because they know it is Biden’s policy to let them in.
The crush of immigrants coming to abuse our asylum system has killed record numbers of immigrants on the southern border and overwhelmed hundreds of our border communities. Democrats do not want to talk about this issue. They want it to disappear. DeSantis’s migrant flight forced them to talk about it.
Maybe someday, they’ll even acknowledge that Remain in Mexico existed, and it worked.
