OPINION:
Weeks ago, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin unwittingly drew attention to the real crisis at the U.S. border — human trafficking carried out by ruthless criminal organizations.
“We need to also recognize a significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco, perhaps as many as half, are here from Honduras,” he said. “And many of them have been trafficked from Honduras… Some of these young men have been trafficked her under pain of death. Some of them have family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers that brought them here. These are not idle threats.”
Though Boudin’s misguided point seemed to be that we ought to be lenient toward certain drug dealers, his words demonstrate a broader truth—by opening the border, as the Biden administration has done, we’re simply empowering vicious transnational criminal organizations.
The border crisis is a humanitarian crisis, and the current administration has only made it worse. And as San Francisco’s district attorney demonstrates, the pain and suffering are being injected into every part of the nation, like a drug traveling through an addict’s bloodstream.
The Biden administration knows this, and that’s why it released a so-called “Fact Sheet” last week about the crisis and its human victims.
“In the six months since, the Administration has made considerable progress to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system while continuing to call on Congress to make long-overdue reforms to U.S. immigration laws,” the Fact Sheet claims. “The Biden-Harris Administration has accomplished this and more while reckoning with the prior Administration’s cruel and reckless immigration policies, which exacerbated long-standing challenges and failed to securely manage our border.”
Slowing business for transnational criminal organizations doesn’t seem “cruel and reckless,” does it? But back to the Biden administration.
The “next steps” outlined in its Fact Sheet are a mix of pie-in-the-sky plans (“making better use of existing enforcement resources,” “reducing immigration court backlogs”) and measures that have already failed (“combatting corruption and strengthening democratic governance” in Central American countries).
One step stands out: “Bolstering public messaging on migration by ensuring consistent messages to discourage irregular migration and promote safe, legal, and orderly migration.”
The public messaging has been clear all along—and directly led to the immigration crisis we see now, with border apprehensions at more than a 20-year high. That message is: “You should come,” as Biden said in a 2019 debate.
And they have. Migrant shelters on both sides of the border are full.
“With U.S. detention facilities saturated, these admitted families are being turned over to private charities, who provide shelter until the families can catch buses or planes to their destinations,” the San Antonio Express-News reports.
And many are carrying COVID-19 with them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sought to restrict their travel as Delta variant cases climb. But the federal government sued to stop Abbott and allow illegal immigrants freedom to travel throughout the nation.
“The Biden Administration is knowingly admitting hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants, many of whom the federal government knows full well have COVID-19,” Abbott responded.
What all of this means is clear. The crisis at our border is no longer just at our border. Criminal organizations are taking advantage of the Biden administration’s stand-down at the border to lure more and more victims, and the effects are felt everywhere in America.
As Congresswoman Kat Cammack, R-Fla., says, “Every town is a border town now.”
The Biden administration calls Trump policies “irrational and inhumane.” But its own approach is far worse—it empowers and enriches vicious transnational criminal organizations. We’re now left with the dilemma of either not prosecuting drug dealers who are killing people with fentanyl-laced heroin or prosecuting them, knowing that their families back home might be harmed.
Insanity.
• Ken Oliver is Senior Director of Engagement and Right on Immigration at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.