Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is absolutely right to say the deaths of at least 51 migrants in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio “are on Biden” and to call the president’s border policies “deadly.”
Those migrants died because the traffickers they entrusted with their lives abandoned them in the baking heat and left them to suffocate. Those traffickers depend on a porous border and Biden’s overt gestures of welcome for their customer base.
That’s the simple truth, and never mind the president’s lame bid to dismiss criticism as “grandstanding.”
From Day 1 of his administration, Biden pushed policies that have signaled — loud and clear — that attempts to enter the country illegally are likely to be winked at. That set off wave after wave of illegal immigrants thinking they’d be greeted here with open arms.
And now we have the hideous result, making absurd Biden’s Tuesday claim that his “administration will continue to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers.”
In fact, he’s done the opposite.
The president loves to pretend that his border policies are animated by a deep concern for human suffering. The tragedy in San Antonio shows otherwise.
Biden well knows the risks people are willing to take to cross the border. He just doesn’t care about the collateral damage from the policy — because it’s not aimed at improving people’s lives but generating enthusiasm among segments of his base.
This was always clear to any thinking person. Biden’s systematic attempts to dismantle US border enforcement have resulted in massive numbers of kids in custody. A tragic 692 kids were in Customs and Border Patrol custody each day on average in May. Some 6% of all encounters on the southwest border that month were with unaccompanied children.
Remember, too, that the people who put themselves at deadly risk to run the border are typically suffering economically. So Biden’s border madness enables a specialized class of criminals to prey on the weakest.
Alas, there’s no end in sight: Month after month, we see a new record number of border encounters — May’s, at 239,416, was the highest ever, breaking the previous record set in April, and so on. Since Biden took office, border agents have encountered more than 3 million migrants. Plainly, a horror like this was only a matter of time.
Then there was the administration’s truly bizarre rationalization: “The fact of the matter is,” weaseled White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, “the border is closed — which is in part why you see people trying to make this dangerous journey using smuggling networks.” Jean-Pierre is implying that the solution is to officially open borders (long a pet project of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party).
No, no and no. It’s precisely this kind of signaling that helped cause the San Antonio tragedy. Clearly, the border was more “closed” during the Trump years, and would-be immigrants knew it — which is why there weren’t nearly as many trying to get in. And the more who try, the greater the chances of disaster.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — who unlike Jean-Pierre hails from a border state and sees the humanitarian disaster as it unfolds — got it right: “Securing the border will save lives.”
Biden and his invite-them-in crew need to listen before more innocent people die.