Biden in denial as border crisis escalates due to his rhetoric and immigration policies

OPINION:

“Saying it’s so, don’t make it so.”
– A friend’s 12-year-old son

The opposite is also true: Saying it ain’t so, doesn’t mean it ain’t.

All of which is more coherent than the Biden administration’s own statements about the border in the last month. The “Biden effect” is in full swing, with literally thousands of illegal aliens entering the country daily — with no COVID-19 checks, no social distancing in facilities and not enough facilities to handle the children in particular. But many of the newcomers were sure to wear their Biden t-shirts to the border.

And yet, even as we are overwhelmed at the border, the Biden administration is doing everything it can to not call the crisis at the border a, well … crisis. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki actually said recently that there are not enough facilities to handle the inflow of illegals, but it’s not a crisis.

Isn’t that a primary definition of a crisis?

So, what would qualify as a crisis? The Biden administration is being very careful not to say how they would even define when we’ve hit the point of crisis.

Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary under President Obama, notably said that anything over 1,000 illegals crossing the border per day is a crisis. This administration has never been below that number. In fact, they’ve been over 4,000 per day for some time now. And those are only the ones they are counting.

No ostrich ever stuck its head any farther into the ground than this administration. The one clear priority of the Biden administration as it relates to the border is to never, under even the worst of circumstances, admit that the border is in crisis.

Of course, the reason for this absurdity is that it is President Biden himself — personally — who has caused the crisis with both his rhetoric and his policies.

Even Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has noted these effects, while commenting that it is unsustainable. Others in Mexico have noted the immediate change in the drug cartels’ behavior when Mr. Biden took office, as they take full advantage of the situation at our border.

Now the administration is scrambling to use ICE transportation resources not to return illegals to their home countries, but to transport them farther into our own country (again, generally without regard to their COVID-19 status). So, while this administration puts restrictions on the domestic travel of Americans within the U.S., it invites in hundreds of thousands of illegals traveling in petri-dish-like conditions and ship them around the United States.

This is an “America Last” policy if there ever was one.

At the same time that Mr. Biden denies the crisis on our border, he is also advancing amnesty legislation and supporting H.R. 1, which, among other things, will lead to many of the illegals now crossing our border being registered to vote. Deliberately or not, these elements all send the same clear message: “Come to the U.S. immediately and illegally, and we will keep you.”

And so they do, in record numbers — beyond our capacity to handle them.

In the past, this had a name. It was called a crisis.

• Ken Cuccinelli, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, previously served as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.