There is a crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border — and in the seemingly never ending quest to make President Donald Trump look bad, the mainstream media is blaming the White House.
But the facts are clear: Democratic lawmakers and their far-left politics are to blame.
Worse, it was an easily preventable tragedy. The current border crisis is a prime example of where “playing politics” in Washington, D.C. has very real impact on very real people — and will likely cost lives.
In 2019, there has been a massive increase in the number of illegal immigrants that have flooded across the U.S. southern border.
“The system is well beyond capacity and remains at the breaking point,” Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, warned in early March after 76,000 illegal immigrants crossed the border in February alone.
“Arrests along the southern border surged 97 percent since last year, the border patrol said. About 50,000 adults are currently in the custody of immigration authorities,” according to a Mar. 5th report by Al-Jazeera.
Now, as of late March, U.S. detention centers are officially overflowing.
Officials say the crisis has grown so dangerous, there’s simply no more room to detain illegal immigrants. Customs and Border Protection agents are being forced to release illegal migrants into the United States without adequate resources to help screen them… or protect them from potential predators.
It’s the problem that Trump and his political allies warned Congress about during the January government shutdown fight over border security. In fact, experts have been warning about this exact scenario since the president was first elected.
A part of one of the White House’s many failed border proposals– rejected by Democrats — the Trump administration asked Congress in 2018 to fund 15,000 additional beds at detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The current situation is untenable,” August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, warned in July 2018. Flentje said that the more restricted the Homeland Security Department is in detaining families together during immigration proceedings, “the more likely it is that families will attempt illegal border crossing.”
At the time, illegal immigration advocates said the proposal was racist. They fought the Trump administration tooth-and-nail to deny their repeated funding and policy change requests.
In fact, these groups even blasted Democrats in the media for agreeing to any funding for border protections in 2018 — even though the funding level was far below what the Trump administration initially asked.
The compromise budget deal “was an old-fashioned shakedown — Trump threatened to shut down the government again unless Congress gave him and his deportation force more cash to execute their racist vision of mass deportation, and while Democrats gave him the money, immigrant families will pay the price,” Greisa Martinez Rosas, deputy executive director of United We Dream, told The Intercept in February.
Immigration officials warned that the inadequate funding would soon have real consequences.
“If we are forced to live with a cap [on beds], we will be forced to release criminal aliens in our custody.” ICE Deputy Director Matt Albence warned in Feburary when Democrats refused Trump’s funding requests. “We will be limited in our ability to respond to state and local law enforcement agencies making arrests for these crimes.”
Now, just one month later, the “breaking point” has been reached.
Immigrant families are arriving at the border illegally in such a high number that the border patrol is unable to handle the influx, and they are being forced to release hundreds of illegal immigrants a day into the country.
Rather than address the dangerous situation, though, immigration advocates and the media are doubling-down on their dangerous rhetoric.
Despite ignoring the Trump administration’s warnings for years, these groups are now blaming Trump for the “manufactured” crisis that is putting women and children in danger.
The Trump administration is “doing this deliberately so they can release a ton of people at once and create chaos,” said Efren Olivares, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told The Los Angeles Times. “The government is trying to do this.”
“We’ve been maybe too bold in stating that there is no security crisis, things are fine here and maybe to save face, they are trying to manufacture a crisis and they’re saying, oh yeah, try this,” Elizabeth Cavazos, another immigration advocate, said about the Trump administration.
“They wanted to create the conditions for a narrative to make it appear as a crisis,” Fernando Garcia, founding director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, told NPR.
Experts disagree. They’ve warned about this growing problem for years.
They were ignored, and now the situation on the border is quickly “spiraling out of control” — and is only going to get worse by the day.
“In February, we saw a 30 percent jump over the previous month, with agents apprehending or encountering nearly 75,000 aliens,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the House Committee on Homeland Security earlier this month. “This is an 80 percent increase over the same time last year. And I can report today that CBP is forecasting the problem will get even worse this spring as the weather warms up.”
“It is a crisis,” a border patrol official told Fox News flatly on Thursday.
It is going to cost lives.
And when that happens, just watch: Even though they dismissed his administration’s warnings for years, the media will blame Trump.
The Horn editorial team