Leave it to President Joe Biden to distract from his mushrooming border crisis — by creating yet another huge one in Afghanistan. Yet make no mistake: The stampede from the south toward the Mexican border hasn’t slowed; it’s accelerated.
Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in leaked audio obtained by Fox News recently, acknowledged what anyone with eyes already knows: The massive influx of illegal migrants will come at a high cost to America.
“If our border is our first line of defense, we’re going to lose, and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said. “We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue, and our system isn’t built for it.”
Unsustainable is right: In July alone, US border agents encountered 212,000 migrants, a 21-year high, including 19,000 unaccompanied children. It’s a 13 percent increase over June’s 189,000 and follows increases every month since Biden took office.
In total this year, border agents have stopped more than 1.1 million crossings. The last time stops topped 1 million was back in 2006, but it took nearly the whole year to reach that point.
Now Biden’s got his hands full with Americans and their allies racing to escape the Taliban in Afghanistan. And Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he tapped to address the “root causes” of the border disorder, has been useless from the get-go.
As with Afghanistan, this debacle was created by Biden himself. He jettisoned Trump-era policies, like the Remain in Mexico program, that managed to keep the situation under control, signaling that all comers are welcome.
Biden could solve the problem by restoring those policies. If he doesn’t, Mayorkas will be right: America will “lose.”
