By now you have surely seen the humanitarian crisis raging at our border. In the month of March alone, our border patrol agents have processed 171,000 illegal migrants. Heartbreakingly, that number includes nearly 20,000 unaccompanied minors, some of whom are being thrown over walls by traffickers and sent to walk through the wilderness alone.
There is no excuse for such chaos and misery, and the fault lies squarely with Joe Biden and his underwhelming administration.
Since his first day in office, Biden has projected weakness. That weakness is having a pronounced, tangible effect. The root causes of this current surge are easy to pinpoint: multiple migrants interviewed have explicitly referenced waiting until Biden’s term to make the illegal crossing into America. Is it any surprise that the man who told illegal immigrants “you should come” to America during his presidential campaign has caused, and is now presiding over, the worst border crisis in our nation’s history?
This is simple cause and effect, and the timeline of events is clear. When President Trump was in office, he approached the border with strength. He constructed hundreds of miles of new border wall and ended the senseless practice of catch-and-release. Crucially, he forced Mexico and other Central American nations to actually step up to the plate and do their part to stem the flow of migrants. The result? Mexico deployed its military to enforce border rules. The numbers speak for themselves. Whereas President Biden’s March 2021 saw over 171,000 illegal migrants, President Trump’s March 2020 saw only 34,000.
It’s obvious why both Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, have refused to go to the border. For her part, Harris has yet to even hold a press conference about the crisis nearly two weeks into her tenure as Biden’s ceremonial “border czar.” They both understand that this crisis is politically toxic and a clear example of their failures to enforce the law. They’re able to get away with this because President Trump’s hard, effective stance on the border was portrayed by the largely left-wing media as too aggressive. By contrast, the mainstream media leaps to accept Biden and Harris’s soft, vague platitudes.
But let us be clear: there is nothing noble, decent, or generous about failing to enforce basic border laws. Biden and Harris might be smiling as they open the doors to our country wide. It doesn’t change the fact that thousands of kids are packed together like sardines, or that cartels and coyotes are profiting off of human desperation at our border, or that the threat of a COVID-19 super-spreader event looms over all of this chaos. Weakness is weakness, and Biden is proving that with every move.
Biden’s weakness isn’t only hurting us at the border – it’s hurting us abroad, as well. His State Department’s first summit with China on March 19 was an unmitigated disaster. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s milquetoast 2-minute opening statement earned a mocking 15-minute rant from his Chinese counterpart, who claimed that America “does not have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.” This embarrassing episode happened in front of a large press contingent, ensuring that our weakness in the face of China’s rough diplomacy would be broadcast worldwide.
That meeting took place in a room in Alaska – just about as far from the hot deserts of the southern border as you can get. But the situations are fundamentally the same. Joe Biden’s weakness is fomenting chaos, enabling bad actors, leaving us open to mockery, and making us all unsafe.
Emilio T. Gonzalez is a US Army Intelligence veteran and national security expert who served as Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an Undersecretary-level position within the Department of Homeland Security. He also served as Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the White House.