Barely two months into a Biden presidency promising new levels of compassion, stability and prosperity, we are already suffering from desperate shortages of all three. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the crisis at our southern border. There we can see the product of Biden’s immigration “plan,” which has brought the opposite of what we were told to expect: cruelty, chaos, and despair.
The Biden immigration policy is the embodiment of what Ronald Reagan meant when he joked about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Like a ham-handed, oafish giant who professes good intentions, this administration makes a colossal mess of things, leaving people far worse off as a result of its efforts.
But this isn’t about clumsiness or incompetence, although there is plenty of that on display as well. The actions of this administration are downright cruel. How else to explain a candidate who encouraged migrants to “surge the border,” then once in office tells the same people “don’t come.” Biden may believe he bears no responsibility for the surge, but those who made the perilous journey may beg to differ. One traveler said in a viral interview that Biden’s encouragement was the main reason for his decision to bring his family from Brazil to Texas.
The Biden White House is especially cruel to the migrant children to whom it professes to bleed empathy. After four years of decrying the purported idea of “kids in cages” under the Trump Administration, the current management had no problem sending kids to the same facilities. Conveniently swept under the proverbial rug by the White House and the media is the fact that it was the Obama-Biden Administration that built those cages.
Far from being a champion of those disadvantaged children, Biden has proven to be the best enabler the blood-soaked Latin drug cartels and human traffickers ever had. By rescinding Trump initiatives like the Remain in Mexico policy and agreements to return Central American migrants to their homelands, Biden has cranked up to maximum power the magnet that draws would-be immigrants to the border.
As a result, the human trafficking business is booming, as is the human misery from this despicable trade. The Border Patrol reported that human smuggling operations to the border were earning an average of over $14 million per day in February. These are not humanitarian groups on a mercy mission, but criminal organizations that seek profits and resort to unspeakable violence against rival cartels and their migrant clients when disputes arise.
Another disastrous Biden decision is the revival of the Obama-era catch and release policy. Rather than being held in Mexico as in the Trump years, new arrivals are released into the U.S. interior, essentially on the honor system to show up for a court date months or years in the future. A new wrinkle in the policy under Biden is that many of these arrivals are now given no court date at all. They are home free, with no official knowledge of their whereabouts or their activities.
Immigration enforcement officials also report that the cartels have taken full advantage of the manufactured crisis at the border in other ways. In addition to smuggling people across the border, the cartels’ other lucrative commodity is illicit drugs. Cartels direct large numbers of migrants to check points, overwhelming agents there while pushing shipments of drugs like fentanyl and opioids through unguarded areas of the border. If these sound like guerilla war tactics, they are—and America is losing.
The administration’s policies are also cruel to U.S. citizens north of the border. Among those being apprehended during the crisis are an increasing number of aliens with prior arrests for sexual offenses. Amid the chaos this “leadership” has created, it is a safe bet that a healthy number of those sex offenders will find their way to a community near you. Once there, they will be shielded from deportation for any future acts of depravity thanks to Biden’s enthusiastic support for sanctuary policies.
Finally, the anti-borders agenda currently in effect is devastating to the Latin American countries that produce these migrants. We are told regularly that those who show up at our border are some of the most hard-working, industrious people in the world. What kind of future do underdeveloped countries have when the imperialist yanquis to the north steal their best and brightest? While the Biden State Department calls for more aid to these countries, such aid will only go to the same dictators and kleptocracies who watch the pressure on them for democratic reforms lessen with every would-be Simón Bolívar who departs.
Aside from the murderous cartels, who benefits from all this cruelty? It is undeniably the Democratic Party that seeks a permanent underclass of reliable voters for themselves, and members of the Republican establishment in Washington who can deliver a never-ending supply of cheap labor to their corporate benefactors. For all the Left’s caterwauling about the previous administration’s immigration policies, we are now seeing unprecedented levels of human suffering at the border which did not exist just a few months ago. There is nothing compassionate about that.