Operation Gaslight is collapsing.
A majority of Americans blame President Biden for the border crisis, a new poll shows, as the administration is caught lying about the makeshift refugee camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
About two-thirds of the 15,000 Haitians living in unsanitary conditions under the bridge have been moved out since Saturday, as local authorities try to regain control.
Just over 5,000 migrants remained yesterday afternoon.
But the tough talk from the administration that they would be deported back to Haiti under a special Trump-era pandemic health order has turned out to be hot air.
Most of the migrants have been secretly released into the community, according to whistleblowers and reporters on the ground, and the administration is determined to hide the truth.
An AP report based on anonymous border sources says Haitians have been freed on a “very, very large scale” in recent days. They are given “notices to appear” at an immigration office within 60 days but if they don’t show up, we know they will simply melt into the shadows.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday 90,000 illegal migrants were deported in August. But officially 208,000 crossed the border last month. So that’s 57 percent who were not sent home but dispersed around the country. Pretty good odds for the chance of the golden ticket of living in America.
The real figures are likely to be much worse, with the Border Patrol estimating that there could be even more “got-aways,” migrants who evade detection to enter the country.
You can therefore conservatively double the official number of 1.5 million migrants entering illegally since Biden became president and put out the welcome mat. The taxpayer burden on health and education as well as jobs is incalculable.
Instead of fixing the problem or resigning, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just lies.
He thunders on camera that the border is “not open … If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed.”
But that’s obviously not true — and no one knows that better than the thousands of illegal migrants who cross the border every day. They know this is an administration that does not say what it means and does not mean what it says.
Typical of the doublespeak and obfuscation was Mayorkas’ farcical appearance before the Senate this week.
Questioned for two days straight, he refused to provide numbers for how many migrants have been secretly dispersed to communities around America.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was suitably annoyed:
“I want numbers,” he told the secretary Tuesday, and accused him of previously providing “factually incorrect information” to the Senate.
Mayorkas was just as ill-prepared Wednesday when pressed for numbers.
“I work 18 hours a day,” he whined to lawmakers.
The White House did not respond to detailed questions about the numbers of migrants released, where they are sent in America, and how many are tested for COVID-19.
That’s despite Psaki promising to provide the data by day’s end.
The uncontrolled immigration surge is a “national security threat,” according to an extraordinary letter to Senate leaders from US Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott last week.
“Contrary to the current rhetoric, this is not simply another immigration surge. This is a national security threat,” he wrote.
As if this weren’t bad enough, now Democrats are demonizing Border Patrol agents in Texas who cleverly managed to close the gap across the Rio Grande, first by parking agency vehicles as a wall to stop migrants crossing, and then by riding horses into the water to turn people back — which is a standard crowd-control tactic.
But race-obsessed Democrats such as Rep. Maxine Waters of California accused the Border Patrol of being “cowboys with their reins [who] were whipping migrants.”
They were not whipping migrants, Brandon Judd of the border agents union told Fox News: “They don’t carry whips.”
What observers who know nothing about horse riding failed to understand is that they were looking at split reins, not whips.
But facts don’t matter when you are gaslighting the public.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) screeched about the “cruel, the inhumane and flat-out racist treatment” of Haitian migrants.
The Congressional Black Caucus marched into the White House to demand action over “those deplorable photos [of agents] riding horses using their reins to chase down Haitians like they were cattle and goats to be suspended, terminated,” said caucus chair Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio).
Vice President Kamala Harris piled on, slamming the Border Patrol as “horrible.”
“Human beings should never be treated that way,” she said.
She really has cheek. It was her job to get the border under control and she has done nothing except run away from questions and pretend she is working on “root causes” for which she can never be held accountable.
And where’s the president in all this? That Rasmussen Poll on Wednesday showed that 54 percent of Americans believe the border crisis is being caused by the polices he put in place.
Biden created this dumpster fire and refuses to face reporters and answer to the American people for the humanitarian catastrophe he has set in motion.
Is it deliberate or just incompetence? The president’s benign neglect of the crisis suggests that he welcomes unchecked illegal migration.
Surely he is not so clueless that he doesn’t know what is happening.
Without a border, we have no country, and he seems to like it that way.
Time for Wuhan hearings
It’s inexplicable that Congress has not demanded answers from the nonprofit that funneled taxpayer money to the Wuhan lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, and its president, Dr. Peter Daszak, collaborated with scientists in Wuhan on dangerous “gain-of-function” research on bat coronaviruses with “humanized” mice in the years before the pandemic. British-born Daszak received tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, some of which he used to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak secretly orchestrated an influential and misleading February 2020 letter in The Lancet that rejected as a “conspiracy theory” suggestions that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The journal did a U-turn last week, publishing a letter from respected scientists asserting that there is more evidence of a lab leak than that the virus emerged spontaneously from nature:
“There is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible.”
Two presidential administrations and Congress have been remarkably incurious about Daszak and EcoHealth. But the American people — regardless of political leanings — want them to testify about the research before Congress, according to a new poll.
Three-quarters of Republicans and Democrats want EcoHealth to be subpoenaed to testify before Congress, says the Lincoln Park Strategies poll.
Why is EcoHealth immune from scrutiny?
It’s embarrassing that US media at the White House are treated worse than foreign media. It has become routine for the so-called wranglers to screech at and even physically push the press to stop them asking questions of the president after photo opportunities in the White House. Joe Biden seems to find the undignified melee amusing.
But this week there was a stark contrast between him and his visiting British counterpart, Boris Johnson, in their attitude to media freedom. The UK prime minister allowed British reporters to ask questions, but Biden refused to answer, pointed at Johnson and said, “No … ask him a question.” As soon as the Americans tried to quiz Biden, the wranglers brought out the whips. The next day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki blamed Johnson for ambushing the president. But that’s not the point. The world sees that Biden is AWOL when it comes to accountability.
