Disorder on the Border: Delusion, Denial, Dysfunction

It is difficult to comprehend, but the crisis on the southern border is actually getting much worse.  And the Biden Administration is giving every evidence of being in total denial about how heartbreaking and chaotic the situation is currently.

Here’s only a portion of what the denial looks like:  In over 70 days of “being in charge” of the border situation, Vice President Harris has yet to make a single trip to the border.  She says she is coordinating with Central American countries to address the root causes of the mass increases in illegal immigration to the U.S. instead. But she has yet to visit even one of these countries.

According to CNN, the Vice President and her staff are in panic mode—not because there is a humanitarian and national security crisis on the border, but because the situation could be politically damaging to her.  She is concerned about how this affects her political future. Really?  That is her concern?  Not the human smuggling, young girls being sexually trafficked, or the threat to national security? Not the drug cartels smuggling record amounts of illegal and deadly drugs into America?

Harris is also changing the job description given to her by President Biden.  Her staff is now insisting she is not in charge of addressing the border crisis; her responsibility is solely to find out “why” it is happening.  While she has yet to actually do this either and has made no significant public statement about the root causes, she now insists that this is the limited focus of her responsibility. By the way, yesterday President Biden appointed the Vice President to also be in charge of ensuring voter integrity in America.  Maybe she will take this responsibility more seriously than she has the unprecedented crisis on the border. But don’t count on it.

Denial is also vividly exhibited by Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.  He is, quite literally, the one who is actually supposed to be dealing with the border crisis.  To this very moment, he insists there is no crisis at all on the border.  He states:

The president could not have been clearer in his articulation of this administration’s position nor could I have been clearer and continue to be so, which is the border is closed and this administration administers and enforces the laws of the United States of America – and that is not only the laws of accountability but also the humanitarian laws that Congress passed years ago.

“The border is secure,” he emphatically claims.  Mayorkas insists that the border is actually closed—and secure; there is no crisis, he says, other than the one created by former President Trump when he directed ICE to enforce the laws of the United States (and in his opinion) creating a separation of families at the border.

Meanwhile, literally hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been detained after crossing the border since Joe Biden became President.  At this rate, over one million people will have entered the United States illegally in the first year of the Biden Administration.  This has never happened before.  And these numbers reflect only those who have been caught.  We have no record of how many illegal immigrants cross the border and enter the heartland of America without apprehension.

We do know thousands of young people are being sexually trafficked into the U.S.  Thousands more are being smuggled in by human traffickers and drug cartels.  In the last few days, over 150 people were discovered in “stash houses” on the U.S. side of the border.  Law enforcement has found hundreds of people being transferred into the country in tractor-trailer rigs and hidden in a converted oil-tanker truck.  Many people die in these operations due to heat and dehydration, and others die attempting to cross the desert terrain between the U.S. and Mexico.  Drug smuggling into the U.S. is at an all-time high.  Small children are brought across the border and abandoned by the smugglers, and there is video evidence to prove it.

Out of the 178,622 migrants encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, only 79,190 (44%) were from Central America.  The rest were from other countries as far away as Romania and the Middle East—including some on the Terror Watch List.  This alone has tremendous national security implications.  Even given Vice President Harris’s contention that she must address conditions in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America in order to solve the illegal immigration issue—that would be attempting to address a problem that accounts for less than half of those illegally entering the U.S.

Common sense would indicate, in light of the above facts, that the answer to the issue would be better border security and cooperation with Mexico to stem the flow of illegals and contain the resultant humanitarian crisis.  However, construction of the border wall was halted by President Biden on his first day in office.  On Tuesday, June 1st, President Biden made good on his promise when he ended the Migrant Protection Protocols policy (otherwise known as the Remain in Mexico Policy) which directed those seeking asylum to remain in Mexico while their application was being processed.  Biden also suspended Operation Talon, where those convicted of sexual crimes were automatically deported. His 100-day moratorium on all deportations was dismissed by a federal court.  The Biden Administration responded by simply directing CBP and ICE to stop doing their job, and deportations fell to less than 3,000 for the month of April—even though illegal immigration was at a historic high for that month.

In short, a border situation that was complicated and difficult to begin with has been absolutely made exponentially worse, exacerbated beyond what any sane person thought possible.  The Administration may as well have sent engraved invitations to the world to come to America:  The border is open!  The only concrete thing the Biden team has done (other than to cancel previous policies that were working) is to suggest this week that we send 4 billion dollars to Central America to combat violence, poverty, and climate change in those countries. Never mind that in the past, funds we sent to this region were often siphoned off by corrupt leaders.

Vice President Harris says her work (if one may call it that) is “guided by two principles.  One, people don’t want to leave home.  When they do it it’s because they are afraid for their life.  The second is we have the capacity to give people hope.  That should mean if they stay, help is on the way.”  To paraphrase Peter Pan:  If I think good thoughts, I just fly, fly away.

The human smugglers and sex traffickers do not care about hope or whether a person wants to leave home.  And they are probably delighted that the Vice President of the United States is offering their victims hope—because it will not change their ugly business or negatively impact their financial bottom line.  Meanwhile, they, too, would have you believe there is no crisis at our southern border, that the border indeed is secure and closed.  There is nothing to see there.  In that, the Administration and the drug cartels and human smugglers are in complete agreement.  But it is, on its face, delusion, denial, and dysfunction on the border.  The American people, as well as the immigrants, deserve better than this.  And we must demand it.