US-Mexico border

Remember when Donald Trump crowded illegal immigrants into cages? What a brute! But what could you expect from a man who was, when you came down to it, indistinguishable from that diminutive Austrian house painter with the funny mustache and a fondness for leather? The problem was, it was the anointed one, Barack Obama Himself, who built the cages and crammed them full of illegal immigrants. (Really they were large areas secured with chain-link fences, but “cages” sounds scarier.) And those dismal photographs depicting the huddled masses? The media splashed them everywhere as yet more evidence of Trump’s perfidy. But, wouldn’t you know it, the photographs too were from the Obama era. Even the Snopes Fact Manipulator, no friend to Trump, had to acknowledge that.

During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Louis C.K. stated a position that many on the left believe but are unwilling to admit: America should open its borders to the world. “My feeling is they should open the border,” he explained. “Just let everybody pour in… Then there will be all these problems, well, there should be. It shouldn’t be so great here. It is a weird thing to sequester a certain group of people and keep upping their lifespan and their lifestyle.” As someone who's spent most of his journalistic career railing against mass immigration, my initial reaction was one of scorn.

President Joe Biden doesn’t answer many questions without his handler-approved list of reporters. So when he does occasionally go rogue, you can rest assured his answers are coming from the heart. Last week, when Fox News reporter Peter Doocy — or as Joe likes to call him, the “one-horse pony” — asked the president why he didn’t plan on visiting the border during his trip to Arizona, Joe had a rare moment of honesty. “There are more important things going on,” he shouted on the White House South Lawn. Arizonans — and the rest of America — might disagree. A Gallup poll earlier this year showed that 41 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about illegal immigration.

Who is the worst cabinet secretary in Joe Biden’s administration? I know that the competition is stiff. Ponder, if your stomach can take it, secretary of state Antony Blinken, the stuffed shirt to end all stuffed shirts. Or secretary of defense Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin, the man who, with General Mark “White Rage” Milley, has transformed the US military into a racially obsessed reform school for budding transsexuals. Halloween is coming — and the Biden administration could field the entire team. But for this quarter’s top prize must surely go to Alejandro Mayorkas, the man in charge of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security.

The debate over President Joe Biden's immigration policies exploded again on Monday after news broke that more than forty migrants had been found dead in the back of a truck in Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott blamed the deaths on Biden, tweeting, "These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequence of his refusal to enforce the law." https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1541596214705135617 Thousands of Twitter users piled on Governor Abbott's tweet, arguing that if the border is really "open," then why did these migrants need to be smuggled across the border in the back of a truck?

Despite the constant barrage of people telling us they are best suited for the job, politics ain’t bean-bag. There is no surefire way to become competent at governing. A politician may have decades of experience or a Harvard degree or millions of Twitter followers or the backing of the mainstream media — and they could still prove to be an utter disaster when given the reins. Look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, home to some of the 'best and brightest’ political minds in the country, or so David Ignatius tells us. What does America have to show for having this elite braintrust in the White House? For one, gas prices, inflation and illegal immigration are all sky-high. Plus we have a supply chain crisis on both coasts.

No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees. Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department's border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further.

The Congressional Black Caucus did not respond when asked on Friday whether they agree with Rep. Maxine Waters’s comment that the treatment of Haitian migrants by Border Patrol agents is 'worse than what we witnessed in slavery'. 'What we witnessed takes us back hundreds of years. What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery,' Waters said during a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. 'Cowboys — with their reins, again — whipping black people, Haitians, into the water where they're scrambling and falling down when all they're trying to do is escape from violence in their country.

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700. Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested 'positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you 'died from’, or at least with COVID. There are exceptions, of course.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.

The Biden administration has repeatedly refused to take its self-created border crisis seriously. Last week, they sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Guatemala and Mexico to address the 'root causes' of the recent surge in migration, one of which she identified as 'climate change’. Harris promised to throw more money at the problem and laughed at the idea that she should go to the border and see the crisis firsthand. Today, the White House sent out a press release insisting that they are taking serious action on what they call the 'border challenge’. The email starts out with a couple of factual whoppers. It claims that 'the trend of border apprehensions in May is a reduction of individuals (unique encounters) and families below the peak in 2019’.

Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on her first foreign trip since taking office this week — and quickly proved herself to be as empty as the faces on the royally-iced cookies she handed out to reporters on Air Force Two. President Biden's 'border czar' traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in a futile attempt to solve an autogenic crisis and insulted the intelligence of each country's leaders and the American people along the way. It seems even Harris's plane knew the disaster that would unfold if she made it to Central America, developing a 'technical issue' to keep the Vice President grounded. Unfortunately for all of us, she was undeterred, switching planes to continue on her journey.

President Biden told NBC at the end of last month that the border crisis is ‘way down now; we've now gotten control’. At first glance, this is preposterous. The number of border arrests in April was a 21-year high, at more than 178,000, with more than a third of all arrests being families or unaccompanied minors. To get a sense of the scale, President Obama's Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, has said that 1,000 border arrests a day 'overwhelms the system’ — in April, daily arrests averaged nearly 6,000. Does that sound like a border that's under 'control’? But President Biden's seemingly absurd comment isn't simply another in his endless series of gaffes.

The Biden administration has twice extended the deadline for federal employees to volunteer for months-long deployments at the US-Mexico border, undermining the White House's attempts to downplay the recent severity of the migrant crisis. In a Department of Defense bulletin sent Friday and obtained exclusively by The Spectator, staff were informed that the deadline to apply to the Health and Human Services (HHS) volunteer program to assist with the influx of unaccompanied migrant children had been extended from May 7 to May 21. The deadline had previously extended from April 26 to May 7.

The Biden administration is asking US Department of Agriculture employees to abandon their day jobs and volunteer for months-long stints at the US-Mexico border, despite repeatedly insisting that the influx of unaccompanied minors has not reached 'crisis' levels. The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offered employees an 'informational unaccompanied minors' session last week 'to learn more about volunteer detail opportunities for employees', according to an email obtained by The Spectator. Volunteers would be responsible for working directly with migrant children to interview them for their legal cases and help connect them with adult sponsors residing in the United States.