More than two months into his presidency, President Joe Biden finally held his first press conference, and within two questions, he uttered a pants-on-fire lie.
When asked about the immigration crisis that is filling up cages with children and forcing border patrol to release COVID-positive migrants into the nation, Biden asserted that “nothing has changed” regarding the border policy and that the migrant surge “happens every single solitary year.”
For starters, migrant encounters reported by Border Patrol were higher this past February than any February of Donald Trump’s presidency. Although some years do see migration to our southern border increase around the spring, migration actually decreased in the spring for three out of the four years of Trump’s term.
But even more audacious than Biden’s denial of the crisis is his refusal to own the very real policies he enacted to cause it.
No, migrants aren’t coming just because they believe Biden is a “decent, moral” person, as journalist Yamiche Alcindor described him. They aren’t even just coming because they rightly perceive Biden as weak and beholden to the activist Left that would prefer we not police our border at all. Instead, our border is being flooded by an unprecedented amount of lone adults and unaccompanied minors trafficked by coyotes and caravans because Biden reversed Trump’s successful diplomatic deals that deterred migrants from getting to and past our border in the first place.
Trump brokered safe-third-country deals with the three Northern Triangle nations that export the majority of migrants who come to our border. In accordance with the international law enacted by the European Union and South Africa, safe-third-country deals ensured that a legitimate refugee, say, an ethnic Mayan fleeing Guatemalan genocide, would have to apply for asylum in the first safe country he or she reaches; heading north, that would be Mexico, not the United States.
Biden ripped up those agreements, ended Trump’s “remain in Mexico policy” that prevented our border facilities from being overwhelmed while we process asylum applications, and decided not to expel unaccompanied minors.
In short, Biden gave Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadorean parents the green light to ship their children up to America, stuffing our facilities past capacity during a pandemic. This isn’t the sort of child separation that Trump had to allow because of the Clinton-era Flores settlement agreement, which mandates that children stay in HHS facilities while their parents are in CBP custody. Nope, as plenty of parents and guardians have confirmed, they’re sending their children across the border alone because Biden has beckoned them.
Everything has changed because Biden decided to own Trump, and now he has a humanitarian crisis on his hands.
