Maybe President Joe Biden isn’t the only one with cognitive deficits. At a fundraising event in Atlanta Friday, his “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris, insisted that everything on the border is “going rather smoothly” — an absurd assessment for a country that just watched more migrants cross the border last week than fits in Dallas’s AT&T Stadium (83,000). While our country is overrun by terror suspects and drug smugglers, the crisis earned barely a shrug from the two leaders, who spent their weekends either lounging by the beach or raising money for the party defending this lawlessness.

Since Biden’s czar has obviously lost touch with the situation, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) decided to send a special Lone Star wake-up call. To remind Harris what border states are facing, he bussed dozens more migrants to the vice president’s residence and let them loose. As for other area accommodations, a local ABC station says that the D.C. hotels and shelters housing illegal immigrants are already at capacity. “There will be more coming,” Abbott warned leftist leaders, floating more drop-offs in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

“Pray that our country will survive” was all that Rev. Franklin Graham could say.

Meanwhile, the tsunami of migrants — which included an Afghan on the America’s terror watch list — is not a catastrophe, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas argued on CNN Sunday. “I would disagree [that we have fallen short],” the beleaguered Biden official said. “We have surged resources, asylum officers, Border Patrol agents, processing coordinators to do the data entry work so our Border Patrol agents can be out in the field. We’ve expanded our holding capacity in Border Patrol stations. … We’re setting up regional processing centers now. It’s extraordinary what we’ve done over the past 18 months or so.”

“Extraordinary,” yes. An extraordinary failure. Even NBC’s Savannah Guthrie didn’t hold back with Mayorkas, demanding to know why, after they’ve had “two years to prepare for this,” there’s so much “chaos and confusion” at the border. Like Biden, the secretary blames Congress. “We are operating with the constraints of a broken immigration system.”

A system, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) points out, that House Republicans have tried to fix — as recently as last week. This “absolutely” could have been avoided, he told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice. “And what you’re seeing now is the actual policies that would keep this from taking place — the [ones] that were initiated under the Trump administration — we saw that tide of humanity slowed to a little trickle. It was policies, not money, being thrown at the border,” he explained.

“… The Remain in Mexico Policy, which I tried to get into statute two years ago and introduced a bill to do just that, says, ‘Okay, if you come to the American border and you’re going to claim asylum status, you can make that claim, but you’re not released into the United States until you await your hearing date to find out if you’re eligible. You wait in Mexico until that hearing date.’ And just by that one simple thing alone, we were able to have 75% of the people who claimed asylum status returned to their country of origin.” Solutions like that were “contained in H.R. 2 … [which the House passed Thursday]. It’s going to the Senate. And now we’re going to find out how many people are truly interested in securing the United States’s sovereignty.”

Biden, of course, is just fine with the status quo. As he said to reporters during his bike ride, throwing open the doors to America has gone “much better than you all expected.” That’s because, Rosendale pointed out, this has been the Democrats’ goal all along. They want the country to be to be invaded by foreigners who are dependent on the government and the party who let them in.

“If you go back in time and you play the quote from Secretary Mayorkas from two years ago, he said at that time, ‘We have a plan. Please allow us to carry our plan out.’ And he has, [because] his plan has been to allow as many people into our country illegally as he possibly can under this administration. … He has absolutely no intention of trying to even slow down the flow of humanity that’s coming into our country. And it’s really unfortunate, because there is a lot of suffering that is taking place [with] all of those people.”

He, like former Congressman Hice, has visited the border multiple times and witnessed the turmoil up close. “They’ve got — what is it — I think up to 85,000 children now [who] are unaccounted for that have been released into the country. Where are they located? Where have they been sent? What kind of conditions are they living in? Have they been sold into slavery? There are so many terrible things that are happening to people that are coming up into this country.”

And the expense to taxpaying Americans is astronomical. The preferential treatment Biden is giving illegal immigrants — over our own veterans, who are being booted out of shelters to house them — comes with a massive price tag. “I’ve heard estimates as much as $150 billion a year in order for us to house, Medicaid, and educate all of the illegals that are coming in.” And because of their status, Rosendale points out, “they’re not allowed to work legally. So that means they become dependent upon our entire system. So we are creating a permanent underclass. And this is not humane. And the way that these folks are treated on the way traveling here is not humane.”

As for the surge being a non-event, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) could only shake his head at the Democrats’ apathy. “Remember,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “President Obama declared it a humanitarian crisis when we were apprehending about 2,000 people a day. … It’s been averaging over 8,000 people a day. … [T]his is an enormous disaster that has been caused by the Biden administration. We [had] pretty well gotten the border under control [under Trump]. We shut down the flow of unaccompanied children, of family units abusing our asylum laws. But Biden blew that open. This is completely his fault. This is his crisis.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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