Southern border crossings are up nearly 500% from this same time last year, with the flailing Biden administration forced to reckon with the worst border crisis in 20 years by releasing tens of thousands of migrants into the United States — 50,000 of whom don’t even have a court date to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This would constitute a political travesty in the best of times. Throw in the fact that 18% of migrant families leaving Border Patrol custody have tested positive for the coronavirus, and Joe Biden’s gamble to reverse all of the Trump administration’s diplomatic deals to stop the flow of migration to the southern border starts to look like political suicide.
Naturally, CNN has found the real story: Republicans pouncing.
President Biden has a border crisis on his hands – no doubt.
But conservatives are capitalizing on it by demonizing immigrants as diseased spreaders of covid – with no facts to back that up. #RollTheTape pic.twitter.com/nmUsbdM5i9
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) August 9, 2021
After lambasting Republicans, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, CNN reporter Brianna Keilar mocked concerns about migrants importing the pandemic into the country as a “bizarre claim with zero evidence.”
“There are some in the Republican Party who insist that COVID isn’t so bad, certainly not bad enough to have kids wear masks in school even if they are too young to be vaccinated,” Keilar said. “But actually, it is bad. They say, very bad. A threat, in fact, if it is undocumented immigrants coming into the country. Again, no evidence they are responsible for the COVID surge in U.S. Communities. It is the centuries-old trope of demonizing foreign people as diseased.”
Predictably, Keilar’s claim that Republicans are lying is, indeed, a lie. In fact, the border crisis compounded with the pandemic has worsened to the point Democrat Henry Cuellar, who represents a majority Latino strip of the south Texas border, warned migrants aren’t being tested for COVID-19 by Border Patrol — all the way back in March.
Since then, the crisis has only intensified with border crossings up to nearly 200,000 migrants per month, 30% of whom have rejected coronavirus vaccines offered by ICE. This would be bad enough if we just kept migrants in migrant holding facilities, but now the Biden administration has effectively codified catch and release into law, not just releasing migrants into the wild, but, in an unprecedented move, releasing at least 50,000 of them without a court date. Of those migrants beholden to an honor system, just 13% have reported to ICE.
We don’t just reasonably suspect the Biden administration is importing pandemic-positive migrants into the country — we know this for a fact.
The city of McAllen alone has reported at least 7,000 migrants entering the Texas border town have tested positive for COVID-19, and in a leaked document meant for Biden’s desk, the Department of Homeland Security has ascertained a staggering 18% of migrant families and 20% of unaccompanied minors released into the U.S. have tested positive in the past few weeks.
The pandemic is either serious enough that we have to mask fully vaccinated adults and children in school, or it’s not. Handing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of COVID-carrying migrants a plane ticket to spread the pandemic across the country would indicate the Biden administration’s current pandemic panic is nothing more than performative politics.
