Byron York begins his article on the present border crisis this way:
Anyone paying attention to the news knows the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border is terrible. Anyone who actually visits the border discovers it is worse than that.
Byron bases this statement on his visit to the border, during which he accompanied a group of GOP House members. The observations in his report support his conclusion.
But why is there a border crisis? Byron persuasively argues that it’s the product of Joe Biden’s missteps:
[D]uring his first days in office. . .Biden blew up the foundation of the government’s handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children.
What policies did Biden throw out?
First, he did away with President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which required asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico, not in the U.S., while their asylum claims were adjudicated. Second, Biden ended Trump’s asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to steer would-be asylum-seekers from those nations into safe countries other than the U.S.
Third, Biden gutted Trump’s use of Title 42, the government’s authority to expel most migrants for the purpose of controlling the spread of COVID. Biden did not throw Title 42 away altogether but is by some accounts now letting most would-be migrants stay rather than be turned away because of the pandemic.
Biden could counter the surge by reinstating these policies, but he doesn’t want to. He’d rather hand the problem over to Kamala Harris, who can’t be bothered to visit the border.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who did visit it as part of the group of GOP legislators, summarized things this way:
What I saw on this trip was chaos and disorder. What the Biden administration does not want you to know is simply that they have handed over the borders of our country to the cartels and smugglers.
Do any Democrats care? Maybe some from districts directly affected by the crisis. Rep. Steve Scalise told Byron that “Henry [Cuellar] is getting to a boiling point, and there a couple of others.” However,
Scalise added that “this is something that you can’t defend, so [Democrats] can only hope that they can keep everybody quiet.”
With the help of the mainstream media, the Democrats’ chances of fulfilling this hope aren’t bad.
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