Last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stood at the podium in the Brady Briefing Room and blamed Republicans for the ongoing catastrophe at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
“You had Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy [R-Calif.] and the Republicans in Congress who continuously, continuously take steps to undermine what is currently happening, trying to undermine getting border security. We saw that, we saw that this week with the, with the CR, where they put forth another, another piece of legislation to cut, to cut, to propose continuing to cut, cut some important resources that’s needed,” Jean-Pierre said.
“It’s [the border] been broken for the past couple of decades,” she continued.
This is a bad faith argument and one the White House continues to make as illegal crossings and gotaway numbers at the border hit records. The staggering numbers, more than 7.5 million known illegal crossings since President Biden took office in January 2021, are new and the numbers for September are on track to hit levels never seen before.
“Important resources” for the White House have nothing to do with deterrence or stopping the flow. Biden wants more funding to build new processing centers, not to stop illegal immigration. Republicans on Capitol Hill want to fund enforcement and deterrence of illegal immigration, not enable the practice that is overwhelming agents and mayors in cities across the country.
The mission of Border Patrol isn’t to process millions of illegal immigrants, the majority of whom have traveled to the U.S. for economic opportunities.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the mission of the force is to, “Protect the American people, safeguard our borders, and enhance the nation’s economic prosperity” and to “prevent terrorists and terrorists weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States” while “defending and upholding the Constitution of the United States.”
President Biden’s policies have destroyed this mission, and mass processing has opened a wide gap for criminals and terrorists to thrive.
“The FBI is investigating more than a dozen migrants from Uzbekistan and other countries allowed into the US after they sought asylum at the southern border with Mexico earlier this year, a scramble set off when US intelligence officials found that the migrants traveled with the help of a smuggler with ties to ISIS, according to multiple US officials,” CNN reports. “The episode was so alarming that an urgent classified intelligence report was circulated to President Joe Biden’s top Cabinet officials in their morning briefing book. For some counterterrorism officials, it shows that the US is deeply vulnerable to the possibility that terrorists could sneak across the southern border by hiding amid the surge of migrants entering the country in search of asylum.”
Meanwhile, Democrats who once touted “sanctuary” status are drowning in the consequences of supporting this policy position.
“Month after month I stood up and said this is gonna come to a neighborhood near you. Well, we’re here, we’re getting no support on this national crisis, and we’re receiving no support…I’m gonna tell you something, New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a recent town hall event in Manhattan. “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”
The White House claims President Biden has done “everything he can” from his position in the Oval Office to blunt the problem while calling on Congress to pass amnesty bills that are unrelated to the current crisis. This is also a false claim and his policies have enabled irregular and mass migration. President Biden could require so-called asylum seekers to wait in Mexico or other countries for their court dates, which are set years from now if given at all. Instead, he’s allowing the Department of Homeland Security to mass release illegal immigrants onto American streets.
“Nearly 600,000 migrants who crossed the U.S. border since March 2021 have been released into the U.S. without being charged or given a date to appear in court, according to data obtained by NBC News, and thousands have even been dropped from the program that was supposed to track them,” NBC News reports. “The practice, born of necessity as border-crossing numbers soared past previous records, was a break from the protocol of prior administrations, which required migrants to be given charging documents with a court date by Customs and Border Protection shortly after they were apprehended.”
The historic crisis at the border is a choice, and one President Joe Biden has fully embraced.
Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.