Commentary: Biden does not care about the crisis at the border

The word is out: “The gate is open, come to the promised land.”

Tens of thousands of migrants have arrived at the U.S.-Mexican border, some wearing Joe Biden shirts and flying Joe Biden flags and proclaiming him as their savior, saying that he told them to come. Many thousands of them are unaccompanied children, some toddlers, but mostly 13- to-17-year-old males. If they are allowed to stay, they can eventually bring their whole families to the U.S. They are flooding Border Patrol holding facilities. Some of these detention areas are as much as 1,000 percent above legal capacity.

The Biden administration will not allow news media access to the facilities and no one there is allowed to talk to anyone. U.S. congressmen touring the holding areas were told that they couldn’t film them, but some did.

The conditions were appalling. The children were packed like sardines. Where is the outrage from the Democrats and the media? Where is the “kids in cages” condemnation they used to attack former President Donald Trump. Local health authorities should be shutting the facilities down.

The U.S. Border Patrol and its stations have become reception centers for illegal migrants. More than 300,000 of them have been stopped this year. That’s more than double those detained in 2020.

The Border Patrol has become so overwhelmed that the Biden administration is asking federal workers to volunteer for 120-day deployments on the Mexican border. When Biden first opened the border, immigrant families were being recorded and given a “notice to appear” in court, then released into the U.S. Their court dates were as much as three years away.

Now migrants are simply being turned loose. Some are taken to bus stations or airports and given tickets to anywhere they want. The Border Patrol has spent more than $80 million for hotel rooms for migrant overflow.

History shows that few of these people will appear for their court dates. Only a small percentage will be given amnesty and few of those who don’t receive amnesty will ever leave the U.S.

Many migrants are assaulted during their journey and about a third of the women are raped. Some of the teenagers being held are surely MS-13 members, a horribly brutal gang, and some of the adults crossing are definitely criminals or cartel members. But no one is vetting them. They are being turned loose into our cities.

People from 49 different countries have been apprehended crossing the border. Two known terrorists were recently arrested at the border.

It is estimated that more than 1 million migrants will be released into the U.S. this year and that doesn’t include the ones who aren’t caught. We know that there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who want to come to our country.

How many tens or hundreds of millions should we let in? How many of these people can our country absorb without destroying our economy and our way of life?

Also, the U.S. has just come through a horrible pandemic and it may not be over. Many millions of our citizens are still in lockdown. These migrants have traveled more than 1,000 miles in large groups through countries that are heavily infected with COVID-19. Few are being tested for the coronavirus before they are turned loose. Brownsville, Texas, tested the illegals caught in that town and found that a high percentage of them had COVID-19.

Remember the George Floyd riots? Hundreds of thousands of people rioted and burned and pillaged cities across our nation while the rest of our country was locked down.

The riots were massive superspreader events, but that was OK because it fit the leftist agenda. Churches, restaurants, barber shops and millions of small businesses were shut down under threat of prosecution. But massive unprotected riots were OK.

Infected migrants crossing our border is also a superspreader event.

These migrants are being sent to communities all over our country with no concern for the citizens of those towns. They will be competing with the millions of our citizens who lost their jobs in the pandemic and the vast numbers of infected refugees could easily prolong the pandemic.

Americans will die because of these actions.

The only winners I see with open borders are the drug cartels and the coyotes who charge the migrants thousands of dollars apiece to smuggle them across the border. Smugglers are thought to be making more than $14 million a day. But smuggling helpless migrants is just a small part of the horrific damage cartels are doing to our country.

More than 70,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year. Most of the deaths are from illegal drugs that are smuggled across our southern border by the drug cartels. Shouldn’t we be at war with the cartels?

Almost every American has been touched in some way by illegal drugs. Crime waves with theft, robbery, assault and murder can usually be traced back to drugs. Most of the crime in our big cities is drug-related.

The Biden administration has almost completely destroyed Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It can no longer enforce immigration laws along the border. And the Border Patrol is so busy babysitting the children and monitoring the illegal immigrants it catches and must release that the cartels are free to move their illegal drugs and human sex traffic into our country.

Former President Donald Trump had the situation at the border under control. He worked with Mexico and the governments of the Central and South American countries to stop the flow of migrants to our country.

He persuaded Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to put 28,000 troops on the border. The troops are gone now, and the border is open.

We have a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis and a security crisis at our southern border — and our president doesn’t care. He is a globalist; he believes in open borders.

The globalist philosophy of past presidents has led to the economic decline of our country. We must protect our country. The success of our free nation gives hope to the rest of the world.

Dugger retired as a journeyman carpenter from Clearwater Paper. He lives in Lewiston.