President Biden Takes a Break From His Afghan and Mexican Border Debacles

WASHINGTON, DC, Sep 20 — Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted to Congress last week that there are still 100 American citizens and several thousand American green card holders stranded in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, there’s a massive new influx of illegal immigrants gathering in Texas. One can only hope that the news didn’t interfere with the President’s weekend trip to the beach. He left on Friday for the beaches of Delaware.

“There are now at least 10,500 migrants underneath the international bridge, with more coming by the hour. Intel is up to 10,000 more coming,” according to a message tweeted by Fox News.

Lt. Chris Olivarez, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters that illegals were gathering under the International Bridge in Del Rio, TX and that most of them were Haitians. The island nation has been fraught with hurricanes, earthquakes, political upheaval, and economic issues, causing an exodus, mainly to South and Central America, over the past ten years. They are now on the move, heading for our southern border along with Mexican and Central American asylum seekers.

According to Forbes magazine, historical Border Patrol statistics, “nearly 28,000 Haitians have been arrested by the Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border in the current fiscal year, which began last October, compared to 4,395 in 2020 and 2,046 in 2019.”

Olivarez says that the U.S. had been flying them back to Haiti when caught at our border. The Biden administration put a stop to President Trump’s border wall and abandoned his Migrant Protection Protocols [MPP], which require asylum seekers to stay on the other side of our border. And so back they came– in droves. But the surge has created crisis conditions at the border now, and so the administration has begun to deport the Haitians by loading them on planes and sending them back to Haiti. That is if the Haitian government will take them back. The airlift will continue for the better part of this week.

The MPP, known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, has been upheld by the Supreme Court, putting another monkey wrench in Democrats’ plans to take in as many asylum seekers as they can. But the Biden administration is doing all it can to stall compliance. Texas Governor Greg Abbott praised the Court’s decision, saying that “President Biden’s partisan reversal of this policy has helped fuel the record surge in illegal migrants and contributed to an environment on the border that is neither safe, orderly nor humane.”

The Texas PS says the ranks of immigration seekers include individuals on the U.S. terrorist watch list as well as a criminal element seeking to smuggle in hundreds of pounds of drugs. The border authorities have made 5,600 criminal arrests since March of this year.

It’s put President Biden in an untenable position. Progressive socialist lawmakers are telling him he has not done enough to undo President Trump’s policies that put illegal immigration in check. And Republicans and moderates are saying Biden’s policies have created a crisis.

According to Governor Abbott, “The Biden administration is in complete disarray and is handling the border crisis as badly as the evacuation from Afghanistan.”

House Minority Leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy [R-CA], issued a statement on Friday demanding that President Biden must “deploy the National Guard to the southern border to help our Border Patrol agents with more resources to control the situation.”

In his statement, McCarthy pointed out that back in March, Mr. Biden appointed his VP, Kamala Harris, to be his “Border Czar.” The border crisis was well underway by that time, with some 274,000 illegal migrants having been apprehended in the two months or so since their taking office in late January, he said. McCarthy noted that in the ensuing months, another 970,000 migrants have been detained, “and that’s just who our over-worked and under-resourced Border Patrol agents caught.” He promised to invite the Vice President to brief the House Republican Conference on the progress she and the administration have made in securing the southern border. “The Biden Administration must recognize this for what it is: A National Security Crisis.”

As for the debacle in Afghanistan, the New York Post reports that there were tens of thousands of Afghanistan citizens who worked for the U.S. during the war years who are still trapped in the country.

These are nationals who, during the war years, sided with us, helped us, and then were abandoned and, now, they are in great danger in the wake of the Biden withdrawal.

There is no official U.S. plan to rescue those that were left behind and so have to fend for themselves. But in the last days of the withdrawal, an unofficial group of American Afghan war vets took the initiative. Calling themselves the “Task Force Pineapple,” composed of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers, and others with experience in Afghanistan, undertook a black ops mission to save stranded Afghan soldiers and their families, according to ABC News.

Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander who led the private rescue mission, told ABC: “Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom.” Task Force Pineapple managed to save more than 600 abandoned friendlies before the retreat was completed.

It turns out that those who were left behind were not left in the lurch, after all. Mr. Biden’s State Department is there to help [not much]. Apparently, they’re telling those seeking to get out of Afghanistan, all you have to do is pay a visit to a U.S. Embassy in one of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries to obtain a visa that will allow you to exit. The problem is, they’re not telling them how they can get out of the country.

It’s the kind of initiative that could have been taken on a broader scale if the Commander-in-Chief had the common sense and the gumption to challenge the enemy.

President Trump called the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan the “dumbest move ever made perhaps in the history of our country … It’s so sad. It’s probably from the standpoint of military tactics and just embarrassment, the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to our country — we look like fools all over the world, we are weak, we are pathetic, we are being led by people that have no idea what they are doing.”

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.