Thursday, March 28, 2024

On Day 40, the Biden White House Claimed There’s No Crisis At the U.S. Border… And That Trump Started It.

There is no crisis (and Trump started it, anyway!) That was Day 40 in Biden’s White House, where they were finally willing to discuss the crisis at the U.S. border.

Biden Meets With AMLO.

Biden met (virtually, of course) with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Monday, reportedly expressing openness to identifying more legal paths to immigration and potentially sharing U.S. supply of vaccines with Mexico.

“During my visits, I got to know Mexico a little bit and its people, and paid my respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe,” Biden said to his counterpart. López Obrador, through a translator, thanked Biden for “for your confession regarding your devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe.” (The Virgin of Guadalupe is known as both the patroness of Mexico and the protector of the unborn.)

The White House press office called a lid as the meeting was still going, and issued a joint statement afterwards.

We Prefer To Think Of It As A Border “Challenge.”

Mere weeks into the Biden presidency, the very migrant detention facilities that Democrats protested against are reopening. Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas took the podium on Monday afternoon to explain why.

  • “We are dedicated to achieving and, quite frankly, are working around the clock to replace the cruelty of the past administration with an orderly, humane, and safe immigration process.”
  • “To put it succinctly, the prior administration dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety.”
  • “It takes time to rebuild an entire system and to process individuals at the border in a safe and just way … It takes time to build out of the depths of cruelty that the administration before us established.”
  • “What we are seeing now at the border is the immediate result of the dismantlement of the system and the time that it takes to rebuild it virtually from scratch.”
  • “A message to those individuals who are thinking of coming to our border: They need—they need to wait.”
  • And a stunning revision of the “kids in cages” narrative:We are not apprehending a nine-year-old child who’s come alone, who has traversed Mexico, whose parents—whose loving parents had sent that child alone . . . We are actually bringing that child into a Border Patrol station as a stepping point to get that child in the hands of HHS, that has the capacity and the unique talents to care for the child—healthcare workers, mental health counseling, and the like—and moving that child to a sponsor as quickly as possible.

Mayorkas also described “a new, innovative way to address the needs of the population that was forced to remain in Mexico”—a platform that allows users to register for relief on their phones, be referred to international organizations in Mexico, return to the U.S. border, and be processed at a port of entry.

When asked “Do you believe that right now there is a crisis at the border?,” Mayorkas replied, “I think that the answer is no. I think there is a challenge at the border that we are managing,” prompting this follow-up:

Q: Respectfully, sir, though, one of your predecessors, Jeh Johnson, he said that 1,000 illegal border crossings a day constitutes a crisis, that it overwhelms the system. We’re at between three and four thousand now, according to CBP officials. So how is this not a crisis?

MAYORKAS: I have explained that quite clearly. We are challenged at the border. The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are meeting that challenge. It is a stressful challenge, and we are—that is why, quite frankly, we are working as hard as we are not only in addressing the urgency of the challenge, but also in building the capacity to manage it and to meet our humanitarian aspirations in execution of the President’s vision.

Bottom line: If “the depths of cruelty” and “humanitarian aspirations” look suspiciously similar, it’s the last guy’s fault—not the inevitable result of leading the world to believe that U.S. borders are open.

ALSO READ: Biden’s Looming Border Crisis.

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