Biden Undid Trump's Border Protection. This Crisis is His Fault!

Suddenly, "kids in cages" isn't important any more!

From the Washington Examiner:

Democrats and the liberal media are policing the words we should use to describe the absolute catastrophe we’re witnessing each day at the southern border. They don’t like “crisis” or “surge.”

So, let us propose this description: Joe Biden’s fault.

Biden came into office with a gift. The previous administration labored ceaselessly and effectively to prevent the precise problem that we’re now seeing. Former President Donald Trump and his White House worked with the governments of Mexico and Central America to stem the endless tide of migrants making their way to southern Texas seeking asylum.

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True, Trump took a heavy-handed approach, cutting some foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with hopes that it would spur them to action. He also put pressure on Mexico to keep migrants on their side of our shared border, where they would have to wait for their case to be adjudicated, which could take months, or simply return home.

Grappling with the border was a yearslong undertaking for the last president. Trump erected more walls in the southwest, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection said were desperately needed. He raised the standard for what qualified as a legitimate claim for asylum, as human traffickers had figured out how to game our generous policies. And he sent the message to Latin America that he had made it as cumbersome as possible to slide into the United States without first going through a process of legal entry.

He did all of this without abandoning America’s legal and moral duty to grant asylum to those who need it.

It worked. All of it worked. As illegal border crossings surged from January through the spring in 2019, Trump explained he would halt $700 million in annual foreign aid to Central America.

The result wasn’t miraculous. The region’s governments saw a new sense of urgency and began busting up the so-called caravans of tens of thousands of migrants making their way to the U.S. Apprehensions at the border took a nosedive from a peak of nearly 150,000 in May 2019 to under 60,000 just four months later. The decline continued through April 2020.

But something else happened in 2020 — the Democratic presidential primary. During that show, each one of the party’s presidential candidates pledged to open the border and load anyone entering the country up with welfare and free healthcare. Biden joined in that choir.

The hymn to open borders carried down to the Northern Triangle. Come one, come all.

As a consequence, the number of border crossings has sharply climbed since April. In that month last year, Border Patrol documented just over 17,000 border apprehensions. As of February of this year, barely a month into Biden’s presidency, the number made it to an astronomical 100,000.

The media have at least acknowledged that Democrats, and Biden in particular, invited this mess. At Biden’s first press conference last month, PBS’s White House reporter told Biden that the “perception” held by migrants was that he was “a moral, decent man.” The Washington Post in February reported that “Biden’s 2020 election victory drew cheers from migrants stranded in squalid, freezing refugee camps in Mexico, and some rushed across a bridge in the border city of El Paso while chanting his name." The New York Times in January reported on migrants awaiting in Mexico for an asylum hearing here who “wept with joy and relief at his election.”

Biden made promises to those south of our border during the campaign and, once sworn into office, he immediately began to deliver.

Thus, after Trump came the deluge. A tidal wave of would-be asylum-seekers, many of them unaccompanied minors, crushed in on our border and burned through limited housing, food, and medical attention. The pictures speak for themselves, showing men, women, and children crammed shoulder to shoulder in warehouses, tents, and even what look like outdoor pens for farm animals.

“Moral and decent,” indeed.

Democrats, of course, don’t see it as a “crisis” the way conservatives do. The only problem the White House has identified at the border is that we can’t accommodate the excessive numbers of migrants coming here quickly enough. But having recognized that things can’t go on like this, Biden has made gestures to signal he at least isn’t blind.

He appointed his vice president to work once again with the governments of Mexico and Central America to control the swarms of people trying to enter the U.S. In other words, it’s back to what Trump had done.

This is a problem that didn’t have to happen, but Biden brought it on the country anyway. Try as he may to blame it on his predecessor, the border crisis is his and his alone.