RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/22/baghdad_bob_at_the_southern_border_145448.html

“There is absolutely no immigration crisis on the southern border.” That’s the repeated message from the Biden administration. It simply isn’t true.

Our leaders are telling Americans to ignore the overcrowded immigrant centers and caravans on the way. Don’t look at unaccompanied minors, arriving in record numbers. Those are mere “challenges.” Want to see for yourself? Sorry, no can do. The administration has blocked journalists from inspecting immigration facilities or accompanying the Border Patrol on their rounds. This is not the way to discuss democratic choices. It’s the way to grow mushrooms.

The media blackout and litany of false statements are reminiscent of the most dazzling press spokesman of modern times, “Baghdad Bob.” The mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein during the Iraq War famously told the world press, “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!” What made his statement so memorable was that, just behind him on camera, American bombs were exploding. American troops were swarming into the country. He bravely — inanely — denied it all. U.S. soldiers, he said, “hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion.” He was soon captured by those illusory troops.

Bagdad Bob set the gold standard for government flacks and the politicians who hide behind them. But he has plenty of imitators. Donald Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated his boss’s ludicrous claims that the 2017 presidential inauguration was the best-attended in U.S. history. Aerial photographs proved otherwise. But Spicer stuck with his story, to mounting ridicule. He knew who had hired him. Today, his old boss won’t even admit he lost the 2020 election or had anything to do with losing Georgia’s two Senate seats, which cost Republicans control of the upper chamber.

In the annals of public deceit, the Trump administration leaves big shoes to fill. The Biden administration is making an impressive effort to fill them, shoveling steaming heaps of disinformation about its immigration policies. Joe Biden doesn’t do that himself. He avoids answering questions or speaking off the cuff, apparently for good reason. So it’s up to his press secretary, Jen Psaki, and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, to explain how the administration is handling immigration. Their answers have only a glancing relationship with the truth.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/19/for_one_brief_moment_wh_calls_border_surge_a_crisis_145441.html

At the White House on Thursday, the president’s press secretary was confirming reports that the United States had agreed to supply Mexico with excess coronavirus vaccine when she stumbled into a potential problem.

The two nations have struggled to stem the surge of migrants at the southern U.S. border, and reporters wondered whether the agreement to send doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine was part of a larger agreement to increase cooperation on border security.

“There have been expectations set outside of, unrelated to, any vaccine doses or requests for them, that they would be partners in dealing with the crisis on the border,” Jen Psaki said, accidentally repeating the exact term the White House has taken pains to avoid.

Even as the number of crossing attempts reaches its highest level in two decades, Democrats have rejected Republican claims that the situation is “Biden’s border crisis.” In fact, the administration has refused to call it a crisis at all. That is, until Thursday afternoon.

“When you were talking about how to go about diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Mexico, you said ‘crisis on the border,'” RealClearPolitics started to ask.

“Challenges on the border,” Psaki quickly interjected.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pompeo-hits-biden-team-for-reversing-the-trump-admins-migration-diplomacy/

As the White House contends with a growing crisis on the southern border, it has heaped blame on the previous administration because, as Press Secretary Jen Psaki put it during the daily press briefing on March 10, “they intentionally made it worse.”

But in a wide-ranging conversation with National Review on Thursday, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo argued that it is in fact the Biden administration, by unraveling the Trump team’s policies, that caused the current crisis. “It is patently obvious,” he said, defending the “enormous diplomatic achievement” that he played a role in crafting.

Pompeo has previously criticized the Biden administration’s border policy, including in recent appearances on Fox News. In a conversation with NR today, he elaborated on the diplomatic outreach that figured into the Trump administration’s work on border issues.

During that press briefing earlier this month, Psaki announced an end to the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), a complex set of agreements with Mexico and Central American countries, where individuals seeking asylum in the United States would be kept in Mexico or other countries as their claims were processed. According to Pompeo, ending these arrangements was a mistake.

“This policy, or what has been come to be known as Remain in Mexico, was really good work by me and my team to make the case to the Mexican government that the right thing for them — these are often El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, who are transiting their country — that this is deeply inhumane, and that we’re not going to permit them to stay in the United States while the asylum claim was processed,” he told NR.

Implementing the MPP, he continued, “with the cooperation of the Mexican government was to turn off the magnet,” and therefore to convince individuals without valid asylum claims not to make the trip to the U.S. border.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/how-trump-got-control-of-the-border/

And how Biden created a crisis by throwing it all away.

I n a few months, if it hasn’t already, President Trump’s legacy at the border is going to look much better even to skeptical observers.

As the Biden administration unwinds Trump policies, and a new migrant crisis builds, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump team arrived at an approach that, after fits and starts, worked.

Counter to the image of the administration taking a blunderbuss approach to everything related to immigration, the push at the border was a thoughtful, creative, and well-coordinated effort across government agencies and between sovereign countries.

It is worth revisiting because understanding how it came about and the reasons that it made such a difference underlines the mistakes that Biden is making now, no matter how much his officials and allies want to deny it and shift blame.

Many of Trump’s policy successes — tax cuts, deregulation, judges — came from adopting standard, off-the-shelf GOP policy. There is another category, though, of intractable issues or unexpected crises that were addressed by innovative problem-solving by officials unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom about what was possible.

The Abraham Accords and Operation Warp Speed, as well as other aspects of the pandemic response, fall into this category. So does the border, even if has been largely unappreciated.

Commentators who were willing to welcome Middle East peace and the rapid development of COVID vaccines, even if it meant giving credit to people they despised, were never going to find anything good to say about the Trump administration’s immigration hawks.

Obviously, department and agency heads such as Kevin McAleenan and Chad Wolf at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Mark Morgan at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Ken Cuccinelli at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and Mike Pompeo at State played a major part in the effort.

At the staff level, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who cut his teeth working for Senator Jeff Sessions, took a lead role. He mastered the intricacies of the law and the system and pushed relentlessly against bureaucratic and policy inertia.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/15/open_borders_an_assault_on_common_sense_145399.html

“Instead of Trump’s “America First” policy, we now have a federal government that intends to take responsibility for the “hopes and dreams” of foreign nationals. Not just that, but to do so while undermining Americans.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

So begins one of the most pivotal pronouncements in the advancement of human liberty. With those words, Thomas Jefferson threw down a gauntlet at the feet of not just the king of England, but also at Parliament and the entire entrenched elite who, up until then, had reserved power unto themselves by dint of their education, upbringing and wealth.

No more, Jefferson insisted. By declaring the truths of equality and of unalienable rights to be “self-evident,” Jefferson freed the common people from the yoke of oppression they had too long labored under — including the oppression of being told what to think by their “betters.”

This, in sum, is the genius of American democracy, that it was based on “Common Sense,” not just the pamphlet by Thomas Paine but the very concept itself. The American people had discovered that they were well enough equipped by their Creator to take on any task, meet any challenge, confront any oppressor. They could think for themselves. That was the key.

Because Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers gave voice to this revolutionary idea, they were granted authority by the people to conduct a Revolutionary War, deriving (as the Declaration of Independence would have it) their powers “from the consent of the governed.”

It is that same consent which has been the foundation of our democracy for the past 245 years, but it must not be taken for granted. Jefferson posited that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-border-mess-11615756253?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The White House on Saturday dispatched the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the southern border, tacitly acknowledging the growing humanitarian crisis as migrants surge to enter the U.S. Stephen Miller, the restrictionist adviser to Donald Trump, could not have devised a better way to undermine the prospects for immigration reform.

FEMA typically addresses unpredictable calamities like hurricanes, but this border mess is man-made. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported nearly 397,000 encounters with migrants on the southwestern border in the first five months of fiscal 2021, which began in October. That’s about 25% more than in the same period in 2019.

In 2019 the surge of migrants led to “dangerous overcrowding” at border control stations and detention facilities, in the words of the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Covid and social-distancing requirements have further reduced capacity at government facilities and nonprofit shelters.

Unaccompanied children are arriving in droves, with CBP reporting nearly 9,500 encounters in February, a 61% increase over January. The Washington Post reports that more than 8,500 migrant children are at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services, while another 3,500—“the highest figure ever”—are stuck at CBP stations waiting for a spot to open at the shelters.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/bidens-open-border-policies-go-rails-joseph-klein/

President Biden is creating an unprecedented man-made disaster at the U.S.-Mexico border – not merely a “challenge” as Biden officials like to call it. Biden has rolled out the welcome mat to illegal aliens as well as to would-be asylum-seekers with dubious claims. His reckless policies like catch and release, reversal of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program, and his open arms extended to unaccompanied illegal alien minors are huge magnets. Biden is enticing hordes of illegal aliens to make the journey to what they view as their wide-open land of milk and honey.

Walter Melendez of Tegucigalpa, Honduras typifies the enthusiastic response to the new open border president.  “We put our trust in God and this new President Joe Biden,” Melendez said.

In February alone, according to preliminary figures, U.S. border agents detained nearly 100,000 migrants at the border. This is the highest number of detainees for the month of February since 2006. In one single day in early March, U.S. border agents caught more than 4,500 illegal aliens crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s going to be insane come spring,” one Customs and Border Protection source told Fox News.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/10/amid_2014_border_crisis_biden_blasted_reckless_parents_145377.html

 
Joe Biden called it a crisis and worse.

“When children travel hundreds of miles to reach the United States without their families, in the hands of criminals in the 21st century,” he said of unaccompanied minors surging across the nation’s southern border, “that’s a tragedy we all must take responsibility for.”

And, to clarify but not offend, he took care to explain who should take responsibility for that tragedy: “the country from which they come, and the country to which they are headed.”

He was the vice president then — June of 2014 — as he undertook a tour of Central and South America. There was no pandemic at the time. Unlike today, Biden also spoke at length about the illegal immigration challenge. Now, as president, he remains relatively mum, even as the Border Patrol detains a record number of kids and overall detentions in February soared to nearly 100,000 — the most in that month since 2006.  

Is there a crisis at the southern border? That’s the question RealClearPolitics put to Biden last week as he walked out of the State Dining Room at the White House. “No,” he replied. “We will be able to handle it, God willing.”

The new president is not the only one who won’t call it a crisis. That same day and subsequently, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has repeatedly described the situation as a challenge. “We’re going to approach this without labeling,” she said. “We’re going to approach this with policy, with humanity and with a focus on what we can do to keep these kids safe.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/no-borders-no-country

Before the lockdown, the Left took a wrecking ball to our economy last year, we were enjoying one of the greatest expansions of economic opportunity in our lifetimes. Unemployment was at its lowest rate in 50 years; the poverty rate was at its lowest in 60 years. Wage growth was the strongest in 40 years. The wage gap was narrowing for the first time in many years as blue-collar wages increased dramatically. The unemployment rate for women was the lowest in 70 years. For African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, veterans and disabled Americans, and those without a high school diploma, unemployment was the lowest ever recorded.

The tax and regulatory relief Republicans won in 2017 and 2018 explain much of this success, but something else was going on that caused the extraordinary improvement of wages for unskilled and low-skilled workers. The Trump administration restored control of our borders and stemmed the flood of low-wage labor that had been suppressing American workers’ wages for decades.

Big business and big agriculture hated former President Donald Trump’s immigration policy because it forced them to pay their workers higher wages. But in the growing economy it produced, working Americans who had been left behind for decades finally began to prosper. Did we learn anything from this unprecedented blue-collar boom? Apparently not, judging from the Democrats’ zeal to open our borders to new waves of illegal immigration.

The president’s executive orders have already produced a new migrant crisis on the southern border.

One abandoned the border wall mid-construction. Another undermines the long-standing requirement that immigrants support themselves and not burden American taxpayers. Another ends the remain-in-Mexico policy for those making asylum claims, most of which are false. Yet another effectively releases illegal immigrants accompanied by youths under age 18 directly into the United States. Another grants what amounts to sanctuary status for a wide variety of criminal offenses, including drunk driving and sex offenses. Another restores unrestricted travel from hotbeds of international terrorism.