For months, President Joe Biden has frantically pushed for Republicans and Democrats to finalize a deal that secures the southern border.
Not because the migrant crisis is overwhelming hospitals or draining state and local coffers, but rather because Biden believes it’s the only way to jam through an extra $61.4 billion to fund the Ukrainian military. (RELATED: DEROY MURDOCK: Open Borders Are Forcing Taxpayers To Open Their Wallets)
The irony, of course, to all of this is that Biden manufactured this crisis since first assuming the Oval Office. On day one of his presidency, Biden pandered to his base by ordering Democrats to introduce the U.S. Citizenship Act, which promised to legalize 11 million unauthorized migrants. The bill, which contained zero references to border security and had no chance of passing, but did send a very destructive message to migrants who likely mistook the bill’s introduction for actual policy change.
On the very same day, Biden also enticed migrants to cross the border by announcing a so called “deportation moratorium,” further fueling migrants’ beliefs that they could easily enter the country now that Biden was president. When unaccompanied children responded by surging the southern border in record numbers, Biden went silent, and Americans have been paying the price ever sense.
Biden’s insistence on using his self-imposed border crisis as leverage for more Ukraine funding comes after he repeatedly ignored previous attempts from Congress to clean up the crisis. Three months into his presidency, for example, John Cornyn and Kyrsten Sinema introduced the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act, a bill that would accelerate the rejection of frivolous asylum claims while providing swift relief for the few who do qualify.
The bill was supported by the National Border Patrol Council and many other law enforcement groups. It also contained a key provision that would’ve required routine follow up calls to migrant children released to sponsors, which could’ve protected them from illegally working in dangerous jobs.
But Biden didn’t just ignore Congress’s good faith attempts to solve the problem he created — he also ignored the very men and women tasked with keeping the border secure. In the summer of 2021, the Biden Administration failed to respond to the Del Rio Border Patrol’s frequent requests for help handling the rapid influx of Haitian migrants.
Biden didn’t just choose not to help them, he actively smeared U.S. Border Patrol agents by falsely accusing them of whipping the migrants. These defamatory attacks came at a time of skyrocketing suicides and turnover rates within Border Patrol.
Up to this point, Biden’s default approach to the border crisis has vacillated between placing the blame on others or ignoring the issue entirely—the exact opposite of former President Harry S. Truman’s saying “The Buck Stops Here.” Now that Ukraine funding is on the table, however, Biden is pushing bipartisan border security measures for entirely the wrong reason.
While any border deal must increase our system’s capacity to swiftly apprehend, detain and ultimately deport those who are ineligible to remain in the U.S., such a proposal must be negotiated as its own solution — not as a means to fund the Ukrainian military.
Because Biden broke the border, he thinks he can exploit the crisis to fund his other priorities and evade serious debate regarding the merits of his objectives. Americans must reject this approach and call on Biden to see U.S. border security as more than just a means of funding Ukraine.
Sam Peak is a Senior Policy Analyst for Immigration at AFP. His Twitter handle is @SpeakSamuel and his profile can be found in this link: https://americansforprosperity.org/bio/sam-peak/
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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