There’s a humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border and President Joe Biden is largely responsible.
The Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 172,331 encounters with migrants in March, an increase of 71% from the 100,441 reported in February. (This figure includes apprehensions plus crossings of migrants at legal ports of entry.)
March’s figure is not only greater than any recorded during all four years of the Trump administration, but it also represents the largest increase in the number of migrant encounters in nearly two decades.
Further, of the encounters reported Thursday by the Border Patrol, nearly 18,890 were unaccompanied minors, marking a 103% increase from February 2021.
Immigration holding facilities are well over capacity limits, putting an unsustainable strain on the ability of U.S. immigration officials to provide for the health and safety of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Migrants have been packed tightly into living quarters that were never designed to hold as many as they hold now. The Customs and Border Protection holding facility in Donna, Texas, for example, is at 1,556% capacity. Its occupants, mostly unaccompanied minors, sleep on floors.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott even alleges minors have been sexually abused at a migrant housing facility in San Antonio.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, refuses even to call the crisis a crisis.
Asked during a recent phone call with reporters whether the White House plans to declare a crisis on the southern border, a Biden official dodged, answering instead, “We are doing our best to get the messaging out that now is not the time to come, that it’s not safe, that people will be turned away.”
This comes after White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki asserted during a March 22 press briefing there “is not a crisis.”
When Biden White House officials do find the nerve to speak seriously about what’s happening on the border, it is to complain they have “inherited” a raw deal from the president’s predecessor.
“There’s a dysfunctional system that we inherited,” an administration official told reporters last week.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas himself told members of the press on March 1, “I think it is important to understand what we have inherited because it defines the situation as it currently stands.”
Mayorkas, by the way, returned to the border this week to discuss immigration with local law enforcement leaders and Department of Homeland Security officials. His visit is closed to the press.
Psaki also alleged last month the “last administration left us a dismantled and unworkable system.”
Good luck squaring this talking point with the fact the current surge of migrants is greater than anything seen under former President Donald Trump. Also, good luck squaring the “inherited” talking point with the fact undocumented immigrants themselves say they’re rushing to the United States precisely because of Biden.
“Biden’s 2020 election victory drew cheers from migrants stranded in squalid, freezing refugee camps in Mexico,” the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “and some rushed across a bridge in the border city of El Paso while chanting his name.”
Elsewhere, in an interview with the Spanish-language channel Univision, a human smuggler stated outright, “There are way too many people. Believe me … with the benefits your new president is now granting, the people found the courage to come.”
As it turns out, there are consequences to campaign promises, including the one in which Biden and every other Democratic presidential candidate swore during the first 2020 primary debate to provide free healthcare to undocumented immigrants.
As it turns out, there are also consequences to undoing the immigration enforcement policies of one’s predecessor in a rush.
Biden, who has already issued multiple executive orders aimed at dismantling the Trump administration’s efforts to control the border, is preserving the program that protects “Dreamers” who came as minors. The Biden administration is likewise making “Temporary Protected Status” available to thousands of Venezuelans. The White House is also winding down the “remain in Mexico” policy whereby undocumented immigrants have to wait on the other side of the U.S. border as their stateside status is decided. Most importantly, the Biden White House is releasing some undocumented immigrants inside the country.
These actions are clearly related to the current influx of undocumented immigrants. (Even the New York Times suggests this is the case.) One would have to be an idiot or a liar, or perhaps both, to believe otherwise.
Whether the surge is because of Biden’s campaign promises, his rolling back of immigration policies imposed by the previous administration, or because he is such a wonderful, decent man, the bottom line is still this: The U.S. border is in chaos, the people crossing it are in trouble, and Biden is the man at the helm.
It’s a crisis. The president owns it.
