The Biden administration, surprising precisely nobody, is facing an ever-worsening crisis at the border. In recent days, thousands of Haitian immigrants have crossed the Rio Grande.
No, that’s not a typo.
The scene is so embarrassing and distressing that the FAA has restricted the flights of drone cameras to prevent Fox News from showing the pictures of what the developing migrant encampment looks like.
These Haitian migrants are part of a larger movement of tens of thousands of Haitians who are trying to migrate to the United States from a number of South American countries, where they fled after the 2010 earthquake. They’ve apparently received the message loud and clear that if you present yourself at the border, or get caught, you might be distributed to the interior of the United States and won’t even have a court date.
The Biden administration has halted deportations, weakened many of the rules that governed Customs and Border Patrol’s handling of illegal border crossings, and undid Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.
This has been compounded by the administration’s response to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, which includes extending temporary protected status to Haitians. And so, the caravans are back and often involve the business of human smuggling. This wave of migration has pushed the number of illegal border crossings to a 20-year high. This is happening even as Homeland Security is trying to settle 60,000 Afghan evacuees.
The Washington Post reports: “CBP is scrambling to send additional agents to Del Rio to help process the migrants, issuing them numbers as they queue up to be formally apprehended, the first step in applying for asylum or another form of U.S. protection. Most of the migrants are likely to be released into the United States with a notice to appear in court at a future date.”
All of this should be a disgrace to the Biden administration. If anything has become clear over the last decade of life — whether in northern Mexico, Calais in France, Lampedusa in Italy or in Libya — there is no such thing as the benign neglect of law at the border.
We’ve seen it not just in the enormities committed by human smugglers, but in the desperation of child border crossings when the last Democratic administration practically invited parents to send their children.
Legal gray zones and/or looking the other way end in disorder and even needless death. This form of invited but unofficial immigration expands the opportunity for human smugglers to prey on the desperation of the poor, exploiting them for extortionate fees, for sex, or to help them smuggle drugs.
It also expands the ambit and opportunities for criminality in the United States. A 2012 poll found that 28 percent of US-born Latinos agree with the statement, “I am less likely to contact police officers if I have been a victim of a crime for fear they will ask me or other people I know about our immigration status.”
That’s perfectly natural to feel, but it’s not a problem that can be solved by continuing to relax enforcement of our laws. It was the lack of enforcement that created a situation in which nearly a third of American-born Latinos are so socially embedded with those who have no legal status that they are less likely to call on officers of the law.
The Biden administration’s unwillingness to enforce our immigration laws at the border is now such an accepted fact that the human-smuggling operations are scaling up.
Del Rio’s Mayor Bruno Lozano explained to The Washington Post that many of the migrants are arriving on what seems to be a fleet of buses acquired for the business of transferring people to the United States. It’s a fleet that can move thousands of people in a week, but which is unknown to transportation authorities in Mexico.
There is a real humanitarian impulse that informs progressives in their desire to just let migrants in, and to allow them to make their own way. But in the real world, American citizenship is a repository of promises, rights, and duties that makes living in America not just possible but safer and tolerable.
Progressives who ignore this fact in the hope that it would relieve them from the moral burden of enforcing the law at our borders are exposing thousands of people to danger, exploitation and squalor. It’s not benign neglect, just neglect.