Biden opened the doors to US before he had a system in place for dealing with migrants
As Republicans and Democrats trade blame on who bears responsibility for the worsening border crisis, the Biden administration has pledged to pursue several solutions that critics argue will only worsen the problem.
More than a dozen Republican senators on Friday returned from a trip to the border led by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, armed with images and descriptions of horrific conditions in facilities housing unaccompanied minors in Texas. The GOP lawmakers said some of the front-line Border Patrol agents with whom they spoke blamed President Joe Biden directly for inspiring a massive influx of migrants since taking office.
But the White House has continued to point the finger at former President Donald Trump as scrutiny of the crisis mounts. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Biden administration is still “digging out of a broken system over the past four years,” and Biden himself argued repeatedly at a press conference on Thursday that Trump created the situation he and his White House have refused to label as a crisis....
James Jay Carafano, vice president of the Heritage Foundation's Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the systems Biden has accused Trump of dismantling simply became unnecessary once Trump had succeeded in curbing illegal immigration through other means.
“They had record low detention, so why would they keep massive centers that they didn’t need?” Carafano told the Washington Examiner.
Carafano called the claim that Trump is to blame because he hampered the Office of Refugee Resettlement “incredibly fatuous on its face.”
“They didn’t need a bigger workforce because they were weeding out all the illegitimate claims at the border,” he said. “If you have a leak, and you plug the leak, you don’t need to call the plumber every day. But if you’re just going to let the leaks multiply, you can’t hire enough plumbers.”
Trump did indeed direct the State Department to cut aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in 2019, when he faced his own migration surge, after lamenting that the Northern Triangle countries had not done enough to stop their citizens from leaving to come to the United States.
But Trump promised to reinstate the aid later in the year after negotiating asylum-related agreements with each of the countries. Those agreements required migrants to seek asylum first in another “safe” country before they could try for asylum in the U.S.
Slashing the aid did not increase illegal immigration, however; according to CBP data, border encounters fell every month from May 2019, shortly after the aid cuts occurred, to October 2019, when the Trump administration offered to resume aid.
Far from aggravating the migration problem, as the Biden White House now claims aid cuts did, the move actually helped pressure Central American countries to stem the exodus of their citizens.
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Democrats have been irresponsible about the border for some time. They see the migrants as a way to steal House seats by counting them in the census, and their H.R. 1 legislation would allow them to vote by doing away with voter ID.
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