[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Biden Border Crisis About To Get Much Worse, Military Called In

Cities all along the southern border of Texas are once again being overrun by illegal migrants entering the United States. The situation has become so dire in some border towns that the mayors have declared emergencies.

The New York Post reported that “over 73,000 migrants crossed the southern border in the last 10 days according to the US Border Patrol — who admitted a further 17,000 illegal “gotaways” avoided detection and entered the country as things reach a fever pitch ahead of the end of Title 42 on May 11.

[US Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz] said another 51,560 migrants were caught at the border in the previous week.

Thousands of people are handing themselves in daily to agents at the southern border in attempts to claim asylum and start a new life in the US.”

Most of those entering the country illegally are processed and sent back over the border under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allows Border Patrol to send citizens of many countries back to Mexico immediately.

However, Title 42 ends this upcoming week, and border towns are preparing for chaos. 

“The leaders of El Paso, Laredo and Brownsville over the weekend issued separate emergency declarations as a public health order is set to expire next week. Title 42, a policy initiated in March 2020 by the Trump administration, comes to an end May 11. The policy allowed federal agents to immediately expel migrants back to Mexico,” writes KERA News.

“‘We’re getting prepared now for what we call the unknown. And the unknown is what will happen after May 11,’ El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said during a news conference Sunday when he announced the emergency declaration. ‘As you’ve seen, we’re starting to pick up some momentum as asylum seekers are around the streets of downtown El Paso and other areas of our community.’

‘[We need] to make sure that we can stand up and be prepared for May 11 and May 12 to have public shelter, public housing,’ he added.”

This is the second time in six months that El Paso has had to declare an emergency because of a surge of illegal immigrants crossing the border into the city. 

Leaders have said that migrants have begun to camp out just across the Rio Grande in anticipation of the end of Title 42. The governor of the State of Chihuahua, Mexico has estimated that up to 35,000 asylum seekers are waiting in Juárez, Mexico to cross into the United States next week.

Authorities have used Title 42 to expel migrants 2.7 times. 

The El Paso Times reported that “there are already hundreds of migrants sleeping on sidewalks around Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Downtown and overflowing at the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in the Magoffin area of the South Side.

There are concerns that migrant sidewalk camps could fester crime, health and safety hazards if left to grow. There were five calls tied to camps regarding the exploitation of young women and drugs over the weekend, the mayor mentioned.”

The mayor has asked those looking to help migrants to not drop donations off at the encampments.

The expected influx is so large that President Biden has decided to send 1,500 troops to the border, which has raised concerns. “Military personnel will do data entry, warehouse support and other administrative tasks, according to White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. 

The troops ‘will not be performing law enforcement functions or interacting with immigrants, or migrants,’ she said earlier this month. ‘This will free up Border Patrol agents to perform their critical law enforcement duties.’

‘DOD personnel have been supporting CBP at the border for almost two decades now,” Jean-Pierre added. ‘So this is a common practice.’

They will be deployed for 90 days, and will be pulled from the Army and Marine Corps,” Fox News wrote. 

The move was met with predictable outrage from leftwingers in Congress. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said, “The Biden Administration’s militarization of the border is unacceptable. There is already a humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere, and deploying military personnel only signals that migrants are a threat that require our nation’s troops to contain. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Administration has had over two years to plan for the eventual end of this Trump-era policy in a way that does not compromise our values as a country. I have offered them a strategic and comprehensive plan, which they have largely ignored. Trying to score political points or intimidate migrants by sending the military to the border caters to the Republican Party’s xenophobic attacks on our asylum system.”

Politico noted that “while the politics of the border crisis have shifted in recent years, Biden could see similar reactions to Menendez’s. Many Democrats fiercely resisted the Trump administration’s deployment of active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, arguing the move was politically motivated, would harm readiness and service members would be quietly involved in law enforcement. The House Armed Services Committee’s first hearing after Democrats took control in 2019, for instance, was on the Pentagon’s support for DHS at the border.

But the Senate’s top appropriator on defense, Jon Tester (D-Mont.), said he wouldn’t object to the move as an emergency measure. He added that the news highlights the need to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security.

‘We need a secure border, if that’s what we need to do now, do it,’ Tester said. ‘The real issue here is that we have to empower the Department of Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Protection to do that job.’

The Biden administration’s move continues the trend of presidents using troops to fill in for the personnel-strapped Border Patrol as Congress hasn’t fully funded the agency to do its work.”

We should not be surprised that the border crisis has gotten worse over the past year or two. Biden assigned the task of addressing the “root causes” of the problem to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“Since being tasked with tackling root causes, Harris has only occasionally talked about the effort as the situation along the US-Mexico border became a political vulnerability for Biden. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, latched onto the issue from the outset of the new Congress, with plans to hold a congressional hearing on the matter just hours before the president’s State of the Union [in February],” according to CNN.

“A senior administration official recognized the attention on the US-Mexico border but maintained that Harris’ work is not intended to solve the immediate issues on the ground there.”

In January, Biden created a “Potemkin Village” in El Paso during a photo op in an attempt to downplay the issue. 

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