Team Biden has cleared out the vast encampment under that bridge in Del Rio, Texas — but only by waving many of the Haitian migrants into the nation’s interior with papers granting them the right to stay.
At least 2,000 took buses to Houston; hundreds more flew out of San Antonio to cities including New York.
Yes, the administration has chartered flights to send another couple thousand back to Haiti — even though most of these migrants had been living for years in Chile and Brazil: They’d only moved north after a few pioneers reported that it had become easy to enter the United States.
The White House is being cagey about just how many have been allowed to stay, but since the camp had reached about 15,000 people, it could easily be most of them.
And the successful will send word back: If you tell US officials such-and-such, you’ll get to stay. That guarantees another wave will hit soon enough, just as the many Latin Americans that Team Biden has similarly waved through (the administration still refuses to share how many) are spreading their own news.
New caravans are already forming: Next month will set yet more records for illegal migrants encountered by the border — and probably for migrants who just make it through without being intercepted.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden on Friday denounced . . . the Border Patrol agents who rode horses to control the mass of illegal entrants as they surged out of the Rio Grande: “I promise you, those people will pay.”
Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas had already taken away their horses, put the riders on desk duty and opened an investigation, but his boss has clearly decided what that investigation will conclude, and Mayorkas was denouncing his own agents, telling CNN that the behavior he saw “defies all of the values that we seek to instill in our people.”
Hey, AOC is tweeting her upset — can’t have that.
And never mind that the whole idea that the agents were using whips on the migrants came entirely from media types too ignorant to realize the riders were just using long reins to control their horses in tricky riverine terrain. And the lensman who took the now-notorious shot says the agents weren’t whipping anyone.
Later Friday, Mayorkas tried to walk back Biden’s “verdict first” remarks, insisting that nothing’s certain pending the investigation — even as he took care to say how horrible “those images” were, especially for black Americans. In short, he’s stuck between standing up for employees who’ve done nothing wrong and a boss who’s already convicted them.
Biden’s border policies created this crisis; the agents got stuck trying to handle it — and the president vilifies them, with the vice president and their own agency chief chiming in.
Pathetic: The administration reacts only to what’s on TV, rushing to clear the camp (after it failed to shut down the Fox News cameras) in a way that guarantees the tide will keep flowing in, then attacking its own agents simply for doing their job in a way that looks cruel to the CNN ignorati.
This is beyond half-assed, ensuring more crises just like this one — and probably worse.