The 'caravan' mob rush on the border backfired

Rich Lowry:

It’s been about three weeks since CNN reporter Jim Acosta repeatedly told President Trump at a news conference that the migrant caravan is “hundreds and hundreds of miles away” and “not an invasion.” Acosta strenuously objected to a Trump ad that showed migrants climbing border walls: “They’re not going to be doing that.”

Now, thousands of migrants from the caravan have arrived in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. Over the weekend, hundreds of them stormed a border crossing, climbing the fence and throwing rocks. US border agents used tear gas to repel the mob. If the throng was too small to constitute an invasion, it certainly wasn’t a rules-bound group of asylum seekers.

Trump relied too heavily on the caravan as an issue in the midterm election, but the last week has showed that his critics were wrong to sneer.

It was conventional wisdom in the press that the caravan was a concoction of Trump’s fevered imagination. It would soon dissipate and, even if not, take months to reach the US. This widely repeated factoid was based on calculations of its movement on foot (it apparently didn’t occur to the media that the caravan would also travel by bus or truck).

In the immediate aftermath of the election, when Trump didn’t talk about the caravan as much and Fox News covered it less, liberal commentators were outraged. The diminished attention supposedly proved that the focus on the caravan had been entirely cynical electoral politics.

But there was a genuine lull in the news. With the weekend’s border incident bringing new attention, liberal outlets are back again complaining that Fox is covering the caravan too much.

The latest once again puts the left’s radicalism on display. It’s not just that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished, the liberal thinking goes; border agents shouldn’t be permitted to defend themselves from an aggressive rabble.

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz wondered on Twitter if the use of tear gas violated the Chemical Weapons Conventions (the answer is an emphatic “no,” and he deleted the tweet). Rep. Barbara Lee of California described the gassing of “women and children” as an atrocity and called for United Nations inspectors. Progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the migrants to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

All of this rending of garments came despite the fact that the tear gas was directed at the adult males who led the charge. Never mind, too, that similar crowd-control tactics were used at the border during the Obama administration, and cops use tear gas during disturbances involving US citizens all the time.

The larger issue at the border is the rules for Central American migrants. They allow adults with children and minors into the country while their — almost always rejected — asylum claims are adjudicated. They can easily abscond once admitted, and the laxity of the system is an incentive for more Central American family units to come.
...

Acosta got it wrong.  The mob rushing the border disproved his argument about the caravan.  Even some in the mainstream media now admit that the migrants are mainly military-aged men looking for a job