WASHINGTON, DC, June 15 — The frustrated governors of Texas and Arizona are asking their counterparts in the other 48 states to send cops to help deal with an unprecedented surge of illegal immigrants crossing their southern borders. They said that they had no other choice since President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “proven unwilling or unable” to help.
Governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas sent a letter to their fellow governors. In it, they noted that “The President and Vice President Harris campaigned on a platform of relaxed border security. These actions have led to the unprecedented surge of migrants who are overwhelming the border.” The letter goes on to say that “Texas and Arizona have stepped up to secure the border in the federal government’s absence, and now the Emergency Management Assistance Compact gives your State a chance to stand strong with us.”
How bad is the situation on our southern borders? The principal source of migrants are from Central America. But now we’re seeing massive efforts by illegal migrants from Venezuelan seeking entry. The Customs and Border Protection agency says that Border Patrols have caught nearly 11,000 Venezuelans so far this fiscal year, between October 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021. The numbers have shockingly increased from the previous fiscal year when just 135 illegal immigrants were apprehended. Things are bad in Venezuela, which calls itself a republic but which is, in fact, a communist state. Their main point of entry is Del Rio, TX; it’s one of the reasons Governor Abbott is looking for help.
According to the Epoch Times, “The surge has mainly occurred over the past few months,” noting that “on March 8, the Biden administration said it would grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans already in the United States, allowing an estimated 320,000 people to apply to legally live and work in the country for 18 months.”
Meanwhile, VP Kamala Harris, who was appointed with the task of dealing with the border crisis by President Biden and who has been sarcastically dubbed “the Border Czarina,” recently told would-be migrants in Guatemala, “Do not come. Do not come.” It was her first trip abroad as America’s immigration emissary, and she’s been taking flak for her performance from both the right and the left.
To make matters worse, she tried cozying up to reporters on her plane en route to Guatemala by handing out cookies featuring her face on them. That apparently did not go so well. And when she got down to the nitty-gritty of her mission, she tried to blame the border surge on everyone and anything except the policies of the Biden administration. Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei quickly set her straight by noting that the new Biden immigration policies caused the surge.
Laura Ingraham put it this way on her Fox TV show: “The real action this week was not with POTUS but with V-POTUS. Kamala Harris has finally run into the buzzsaw that she’s probably been avoiding her entire life. It’s called reality, as in having to answer serious questions about a real, real problem, the border crisis, which Biden foisted on her to address, but instead, it’s just become a mess. … And by the way, Harris is showing signs of cracking.”
Senator Ted Cruz [R-TX] pointed out that the Trump Administration took the border crisis seriously with its “zero tolerance” approach. Meanwhile, he said she goes and tells the Guatemalan people that the Biden Administration has pledged itself to a more humane immigration policy. Cruz told Fox News, “We’ve seen in the five months they’ve been in office, an absolute disaster unfolding at the border.”
Ms. Harris’s absence at the border has been a point of contention and probably will continue to be going forward. As Congressman Andy Biggs [R-AZ] noted, Harris has embarrassingly refused to visit the border. Biggs says: ‘It is not a grand gesture for Vice President Harris to inspect the damage and inhumanity fueled by the Biden Administration at the southern border. However, Kamala would rather turn a blind eye to the mounting chaos than reinforce Trump’s policies that would bring security and stability back to our border.”
Progressive socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY] took umbrage at Harris’s “do not come” remarks. Ocasio-Cortez said that “seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of arrival.” However, she apparently forgot to mention that crossing borders without permission is illegal.
Meanwhile, the statistics are frightening at best. We are fast approaching the 400,000 mark for arrests at the border in the past nine months– the vast majority of whom were single men. That’s more than twice as many arrests than there were during the same period last year — during the waning days of the Trump Administration. About 160,000 arrests were made at the border during that period. And, if you ask those migrants why they came, they’ll tell you that it is because they believe President Biden would welcome them. After all, Mr. Biden did roll back key illegal immigration rules that Mr. Trump instituted.
But progressives in Congress don’t think the rule changes are not enough. Their demands stop short of simply opening the border to anyone who shows up. It’s a matter of social justice, they say. But one can only wonder whether the reality is that migrants — legal or illegal — can enormously increase the numbers of potential voters who are likely to cast ballots for Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats.