OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
For a time during then-President Donald Trump’s term, he dealt for months with streams of migrant caravans that overwhelmed holding facilities along the U.S.-Mexico border, which led to harsh criticism of him from major media outlets.
Trump solved the crisis by ordering customs and border agents to vigorously enforce existing laws against illegal immigration while imposing a series of executive orders and policies including the so-called “Remain In Mexico” rule that forced the vast majority of migrants back over the border to await their asylum claims.
By any measure, after 2019, the U.S.-Mexico border was the most secure it had been in years, even leading immigration authorities to close down excess holding areas due to a lack of need.
But on President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he reversed most of Trump’s immigration and border security policies, which predictably led to a new migrant crisis along the border — one that has endured for nearly all of Biden’s time in office.
The difference now, however, appears to be a distinct lack of interest by most of the same major media outlets that were so critical of Trump, especially now that many of the same holding facilities are grossly overcrowded, creating unsafe and unsanitary conditions for thousands of migrants.
New photos published by The Washington Examiner show just how massive the crisis has become and how migrants who have paid human traffickers to bring them to the United States are being treated.
The Daily Caller reports:
The photographs reveal the overcrowded conditions in which migrants are detained, such as small rooms packed with dozens of people and people sleeping on the floor in spaces meant for recreation and sports, according to images obtained by the Examiner from U.S. Border Patrol agents.
“Night and day, smugglers push migrants across the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, TX by the dozen or hundreds,” the Examiner’s immigration reporter, Anna Giaritelli, noted on Twitter along with a photo highlighting the overcrowding.
Night and day, smugglers push migrants across the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, TX by the dozen or hundreds.
“Since the groups are so large, there’s no room for where we do the intake, so they have to take them to the rec area," said a Border Patrol agent who works inside. pic.twitter.com/3UNLnbRvqf
— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) July 25, 2022
“Small rooms are crammed with dozens of people. Migrants sleep on the floor on 4-inch-thick mats and shiny Mylar blankets — same things immigrant advocates decried during Trump admin,” she wrote in another tweet.
SCOOP: Inside one of Border Patrol's tents where migrants are detained
Small rooms are crammed with dozens of people. Migrants sleep on the floor on 4-inch-thick mats and shiny Mylar blankets — same things immigrant advocates decried during Trump admin.https://t.co/Icpr74Sm9i pic.twitter.com/Yat8KnvCsf
— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) July 25, 2022
The Examiner adds:
In interviews with agents, all communicated that the mission was not to deter illegal immigration, which is unfolding at the highest level in national history. The goal is to get people who come across into a facility, processed into the system, and, more likely than not, released into the United States rather than returned to their country of origin. If people could see inside, they would be repulsed by the scale of the migrant detention operation, one Border Patrol agent told the Washington Examiner.
“I think they’d be disgusted — not because it’s dirty. It’s not dirty at all. I think they’d be disgusted at the situation and that nobody can wrap their head around what’s going on,” said one agent who works at the newest large tent complex where outside Eagle Pass, Texas, where massive migrant in-processing takes place.
Giaritelli writes: “The Trump administration drew fury from Democrats over how it handled smaller flows of people during the 2019 humanitarian crisis, and the Biden-Harris campaign pledged to improve conditions for migrants.
“While the Biden administration has succeeded to some extent in detaining migrants for only one to two days, in better-lit and air-conditioned rooms as opposed to outside under a bridge or in cells for weeks, much is still the same,” she added.
In March 2021, roughly a month after he took office, Biden assigned Vice President Kamala Harris the task of resolving the already mounting border crisis. But by all indications, Harris has essentially neglected that duty; in nearly every month since she was assigned the border issue to solve, illegal immigration has only gotten worse.
What’s more, the worsening border situation is adding to the administration’s appallingly bad approval rating.
“Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” Biden pollster John Anzalone and his team warned in confidential polling, voter surveys and recommendations compiled for the White House in May, according to The New York Times. “Voters do not feel he has a plan to address the situation on the border, and it is starting to take a toll.”
