It is the Democrats’ conceit that they’re members of the reality-based party. They like to tag Republicans and conservatives as “deniers” of plain facts. It’s a highly debatable proposition in many policy areas — GMO crops and abortion come to mind — but the Democrats’ starkest evasion of facts is currently at the nation’s southern border. The party’s only tactic is outright denial of the plain truth that we have a crisis, and their denial is making it worse.
“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage and stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in January, as the White House and Congress wrangled over shutting down the government over money for border security.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said of the president’s Oval Office address calling for a border wall, “This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear, and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.”
Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said after the Oval Office address, “There is a crisis, alright, but it’s in [Trump’s] poor mind.”
This flippancy contrasts glaringly with the facts.
More than 50,000 migrants were arrested each month in October, November, and December 2018 trying to enter the U.S. illegally. This flood was much higher than the previous year’s monthly average, according to Customs and Border Protection officials. The number in December was a record high. The sheer volume of families illegally crossing into America in recent months has overwhelmed officials at the border and created a new kind of “humanitarian crisis,” the New York Times finally realized in January. Meanwhile, immigration courts are badly overwhelmed and reported a backlog of 760,000 cases in January before the government shutdown, according to the Justice Department.
It is only “a matter of time” before tragedy strikes at one of the Customs and Border Protection’s holding facilities, Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said in March. There are more than 13,000 migrants in custody in El Paso, Texas, he said, adding that most of the migrants are families or unaccompanied children.
“On Monday and Tuesday, CBP started the day with over 12,000 migrants in our custody,” he said. “As of this morning, that number was 13,400. A high number for us is 4,000. A crisis level is 6,000. 13,000 is unprecedented.”
As for the journey itself, it is often treacherous; 31% of female migrants say they were sexually abused while traveling through Mexico, according to Doctors Without Borders.
“You’ve got a humanitarian crisis, which has created a border security crisis for us, that we’ve been doing this for an awfully long time, and this is all being driven by policy crisis,” Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Raul Ortiz of the U.S. Border Patrol said in an interview with CNN this week. “And until we fix the policy crisis, we’re going to continue to deal with the other two.”
President Trump exaggerates some threats, for instance, leaving the impression that the migrant caravans are criminal drug gangs. And because we believe in the separation of powers, we have opposed Trump’s use of emergency powers to reallocate funds in a way Congress has not authorized.
Democrats could challenge Trump on policy, but instead they ludicrously deny his obviously correct premise. Why? First, and most obviously, they don’t want to stanch illegal immigration. Second, they don’t actually want presidential powers curbed. Their meta-agenda is to expand the power of the executive so it can be a superlegislator unhindered by democratic legitimacy. The party fiercely defended President Barack Obama’s repeated usurpations of legislative power. It worried that Justice Brett Kavanaugh would curb executive power.
So, lacking a principled argument against Trump’s unscrupulous use of executive power, they deny the plain facts. This isn’t just stupid, but it’s also dangerous, for it exacerbates the crises itself.
What is bringing a flood of families to the gates of our southern border? What is causing the spike in illegal crossings? The most obvious reason is that people in Central America know the U.S. border is open, particularly to people with children, and offers a golden opportunity to migrate immediately rather than legally.
Our border needs many more miles of wall and better wall. It needs more manpower and more technology. We need better facilities to hold asylum-seekers. We also need better immigration laws.
Until we get those things, we need most urgently to send a message that illegal immigrants will not be allowed to sneak into the U.S. and stay here. It needs to be both stated and true that arriving at the border with a child won’t allow you to skip the queue.
Democratic leaders could end the crisis by simply standing with Trump and broadcasting the message clearly, in English and Spanish, that we don’t tolerate illegal immigrants and will catch them and that dragging your children across dangerous deserts to arrive at our border hoping for asylum is not an entry ticket.
But stanching the flood in that simple way would require admitting there is a crisis. It would also involve putting the national interest above politics.
