It takes an extraordinary amount of gall to order uniformed men into a dangerous situation that you yourself created and then, after they have done their job valiantly, defame them on national television.
But that is exactly what President Joe Biden did this week.
Thanks to his open invitation to illegal border-crossers (“You should come”), his catch-and-release policies, and his dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Biden has created an environment for the development of chronic humanitarian crises at the southern border.
One such crisis metastasized last week in Del Rio, Texas, where a shantytown of 15,000 Haitian migrants formed under a bridge linking the United States to Mexico. The migrants had been trickling through Del Rio for weeks, where Customs and Border Protection agents would process and release them into the U.S., which is Biden’s policy.
The migrants were only responding to incentives created by Biden. In cities throughout the U.S., the Haitian diaspora has been communicating with their friends and family throughout the hemisphere using Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Their message? Now is the time to come.
So, the trickle of migrants turned into a steady stream and then a flood. Soon, migrants were arriving faster than CBP could process them, eventually leading to the unsanitary and unstable conditions that have forced CBP to shut down the bridge to legal international traffic.
The images of this squalid shantytown became a political liability for Biden, so he then used every tool at his disposal to liquidate the camp as quickly as possible. The Department of Homeland Security made a huge show of flying some of the Haitian migrants back to Haiti, but most were simply processed into the U.S., only faster. Instead of receiving a notice to appear, which gives an exact date the migrant must appear in immigration court, the migrants were given a notice to return, which only requests that they check in with ICE officials sometime in the next 60 days. Notices to appear take an hour to issue, whereas notices to return take just 20 minutes.
In addition to moving out those already under the bridge, the Biden administration sought to cut the flow of new migrants coming to the bridge by deploying mounted CBP agents.
Last Sunday, a photographer from the Mexican side of the border photographed these mounted CBP agents in action, including agents using reins to control their horses. These pictures were then used by open-borders activists and their allies in the media to accuse the border agents falsely of whipping the Haitian migrants.
Biden apparently believed these lies. “To see people treated like they did, horses running them over, people being strapped,” Biden said while making a whipping motion with his hand. “It’s outrageous. I promise you those people will pay.”
Except that no migrant was ever run over by any horse, and no migrant was ever whipped or strapped. The photographer who took the photos explained to a local news station, “Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses. I’ve never seen them whip anyone.”
The agents Biden defamed and the migrants he cruelly sent back to Haiti are all just collateral damage in Biden’s larger southern border strategy. It is not that Biden wants to facilitate a full-scale invasion of the southern border. It is that the radical leftists who staff his administration honestly believe that anyone in the world who wants to come to America should have the right to do so.
But Biden can’t admit openly that this is his policy. Instead, he sends out Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to say brash things such as, “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed.” That’s what Mayorkas reiterated on Monday, even as CBP agents under his control were processing Haitians who had crossed illegally into the U.S. as quickly as possible.
The obvious contradiction between the Biden administration’s rhetoric and its policies will only lead to more incidents such as the one at the Del Rio bridge. The only question is, how many lives will Biden ruin in the process?
