New York Post, November 28, 2023
The Biden administration claims its border policies are creating “a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”
In fact, they’ve created a humanitarian disaster.
Vice President Kamala Harris can say “Do not come” until she’s out of breath, but people will keep making the dangerous trek to the US border so long as there are good odds of being released into the country by the Border Patrol.
And the odds are really good — since President Biden’s inauguration, his administration has taken into custody and then released some three million illegal aliens.
And that’s not counting the million and a half (or more) who weren’t caught, but who know they’re home free because the White House has stopped most immigration enforcement inside the country, too.
But isn’t stopping all that nasty law enforcement “humane”?
No, because Biden’s catch-and-release policies are enticing millions to undertake risky journeys that frequently result in injury or death.
One of the most perilous stretches of the long road to the US border is the Darien Gap in eastern Panama.
It’s a “gap” because it’s about 60 miles of roadless jungle that illegal immigrants from the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and beyond have to walk through on their way north.
The nonprofit group Doctors Without Borders recently reported that “Sexual violence in the Darien Gap is increasing,” with stories of “rape tents” and victims as young at 11 years old.
The mayor of a town in the area said people routinely die trying to cross the jungle, succumbing to disease or being washed away by rushing rivers.
Many others are robbed, sometimes by bandits from his own tribe, even as the ceaseless flow of migrants (half a million just this year) trashes the tribe’s home territory.
And the inhumanity doesn’t end when the survivors emerge from the jungle. There are 2,000 more miles of kidnappers, robbers, and rapists to pass through.
The same Doctors Without Borders group reported in early 2017 on the consequences of Obama’s lax policies in encouraging illegal immigration.
It reported that two-thirds of foreigners crossing through Mexico reported being victims of violence, including one-third of women who said they’d been sexually abused.
And then when migrants get to Mexico’s northern border towns they have to contend with both the local smuggling gangs and the larger drug cartels that divide the border region into separate zones of control. Reuters has reported that rapes of migrants this year in the Mexican cities across the Rio Grande from South Texas are the highest ever recorded.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration reports that the US-Mexico border is the “world’s deadliest migration land route,” with nearly 700 documented deaths last year.
The Border Patrol tries to prevent such unnecessary deaths, functioning as the dry-land counterpart to the Coast Guard.
Before the Biden administration, the Border Patrol rescued 4,000-5,000 illegal aliens a year on the border, from heat stroke, drowning, and other perils.
That already seems like a lot. But once Biden’s “humane” border policies kicked in, the number leapt to nearly 13,000 in FY 2021, then 22,000 in 2022, and more than 37,000 in FY 2023, which ended in September.
Did the sun get hotter, or the Rio Grande deeper? No. What happened is that as ever-more people abroad have been lured to take their chances at the border, ever-more of them have fallen victim to the perils of the journey.
Even with proper border and immigration enforcement, there will always be people willing to take foolish risks to sneak in. In that case, the responsibility for what befalls the migrants is on them, and on the criminals preying on them.
But people respond to incentives, and the Biden administration’s stubborn refusal to enforce the immigration law has attracted millions to the US-Mexico border who would not otherwise have made the journey.
Those millions have suffered hundreds of thousands of robberies, kidnappings, rapes, and deaths that would not have happened but for Joe Biden’s policies.
The president, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the others setting immigration policy aren’t monsters – they’re undoubtedly as horrified by these crimes as anyone else.
Nonetheless, they share the blame for every little girl raped in the Darien Gap, every young man kidnapped by a cartel in Mexico, every family washed away in the Rio Grande.
“Safe, orderly, and humane”? Hardly.