Democrats’ Immigration Lies Are Finally Catching Up to Them

Democrats’ Immigration Lies Are Finally Catching Up to Them
Ruben Navarrette Jr., The Daily Beast
Wed, September 22, 2021, 3:03 AM

It’s what you tell your teenagers: Don’t lie. Because then you’ll have to tell another lie to cover up the first lie, and then another, and another. Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you don’t recognize the truth—until it comes out. And the truth always comes out.

Democrats have been lying about immigration for decades. They’ve told white voters in the suburbs that they support border security and oppose amnesty for undocumented immigrants. At the same time, they’ve told Latino voters in the Southwest that they support a path to citizenship and oppose militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border.

And they hoped the two camps were sufficiently ensconced in different worlds that they would never meet up, let alone compare notes.

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Democrats have always wanted to have their flan and eat it too. They weren’t content to get only the votes of blue-collar union members in Michigan who want less immigration because they fear demographic change and can’t keep up with the work ethic of immigrants. They also wanted to snap up the votes of Latinos in Arizona who—still reeling from the racist, GOP-sponsored immigration law passed in 2010 that required local police to try their hand at enforcing federal law—looked to the Democratic Party for a kinder and gentler approach to recent arrivals.

The only way to pull that off was to lie, lie, lie. You promise everything to everyone, and then deliver only what is politically beneficial or advantageous to you.

Over the last few days, the truth has come out—both in the backrooms of the U.S. Senate and amid the chaos of a humanitarian crisis unfolding on the Texas-Mexico border.

The lies are being exposed even as many in the liberal media try their hardest to cover up the abuses and failures of the Biden administration, and even as the Republican Party continues popping off with ridiculous and racist statements to create just enough confusion to distract from the immigration rights activists who are lining up to criticize Democrats.

In Washington, Senate Democrats are acting shocked—shocked!—that their feeble attempt to shove through an ambitious pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in the Trojan horse of a $3.5 trillion spending bill designed to expand America’s social safety net was shot down by the Senate parliamentarian Sunday night.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough wrote in her rebuke: ”Changing the law to clear the way to (Legal Permanent Resident) status is tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact.”

Gee, who could have predicted this maneuver wouldn’t fly? Anyone who understands how the Senate functions, that’s who.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—the lead proponent of this stunt—has served in the upper chamber since 1999. He says that “We are deeply disappointed in this decision” but you’ll notice that he doesn’t say “We are surprised.”

Here you have a major change in public policy that has nothing to do with budgetary matters, and touches on the most divisive issue since slavery, and Democrats nonchalantly stick it into a spending bill? Why it’s almost as if they knew it was going to fail, but they were counting on MacDonough to be the villain. That way, they could go back to their constituents, to whom they’ve been lying this whole time, and claim they had done their best. But wouldn’t you know it? The mean parliamentarian stopped them from legalizing those poor undocumented immigrants.

Of course, MacDonough did nothing of the sort. All she did was offer an opinion. Democrats can do whatever they want, and take the consequences. They don’t have to hide behind the parliamentarian’s ruling.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind: Democrats control everything in Washington. The whole shooting match. The White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. And they still can’t pass immigration reform, with a pathway to citizenship, on the level? That’s the real scandal.

I know what you’re thinking. But the problem isn’t the filibuster. The problem is that the Democratic majority in the Senate can’t count on the votes of conservative members like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona or Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. And the leadership doesn’t care enough about immigration reform to twist arms and get it done. It’s not a priority.

And why not? Because then the Democrats would essentially adopt all those newly legalized immigrants, and become known in future elections as the “amnesty brigade” or the “open border party.” Being tagged with a label like that makes it hard to win votes among suburban whites. And that’s the constituency Democrats really want to win over.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is also lying up a storm at the U.S.-Mexico border where—a stone’s throw from Del Rio, Texas—an estimated 20,000 Haitian refugees have arrived at America’s front door after walking for two months from various countries in South America, including Colombia and Chile.

That’s where many Haitians settled and have been living since 2010, when a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake destroyed much of their country. Add to that another earthquake, a 7.2, last month, along with floods and mudslides, and the country is a disaster area even before you get to the assassination of the president. People have nothing, and so they’re leaving.

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And, as we all could have predicted, some have come to the United States. Blame the copper lady in New York harbor who keeps inviting "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” to the golden door. Instead, Haitians were received by border patrol agents on horseback, who have been filmed whipping and otherwise threatening and intimidating these poor, defenseless people.

It’s not all about racism, expect where it is. I have a difficult time imagining border patrol agents on horseback shouting and striking blue-eyed white immigrants from Sweden or Norway with the same reckless abandon they did these poor Haitians.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress on Tuesday that the Biden administration is planning to deport back to Haiti “within the next 1o days or so” the estimated 10,000 or so immigrants who remain huddled under a bridge in Del Rio. Thousands more have retreated back into Mexico in recent days rather than face deportation. Tragically, they have been met there with violent resistance from Mexican immigration authorities.

No one, it seems, wants Haiti’s human “wretched refuse.”

For those who remain on this side of the border, there will be no court-appointed immigration lawyers, no immigration judges, no immigration hearings. Only one-way flights back to the horror they tried so mightily to escape. At the dizzying rate of as many as a thousand people a day, according to authorities.

This nightmare is being brought to us by an administration that has repeatedly pledged to deliver a "fair and humane" immigration policy and has gone out of its way to portray itself as a vast improvement on the racist and nativist policies pushed by former President Donald Trump.

The White House condemned the alleged behavior of the border patrol agents on horseback. On Monday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation.

On Tuesday, Mayorkas told lawmakers that “any mistreatment or abuse of a migrant is unacceptable,” and he promised to get to the bottom of the incident.

“I'm going to let the investigation run its course,” he told CNN. “But the pictures that I observed troubled me profoundly. That defies all of the values that we seek to instill in our people.”

Such pretty words. If only we could believe them.

Texas braces for surge of 60,000 Haitian migrants
Greg Abbott, Anna Giaritelli, THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Tue, October 5, 2021, 5:00 AM



AUSTIN, Texas — State officials are bracing for what could be the largest surge of migrants ever to attempt to enter the country illegally from Mexico, weeks after thousands of Haitians did so.

While border security falls under the federal government's responsibility, the Biden administration has significantly reined in the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This has resulted in fewer deportations and many people being released into the United States after illegally crossing the border, potentially incentivizing more illegal migration. Overwhelmed Border Patrol agents have been pulled from the border to process people in custody, leaving the border unguarded in many regions.

Texas government and law enforcement leaders have stepped up efforts to make up for the federal government's absence, and leaders spent the weekend preparing for a possible rush of more than 60,000 Haitian migrants. Most of the Haitians have traveled from South America to cross the border rather than traveling to a port of entry.

The number of Haitian migrants headed to the U.S. could be four times the size of the group that made it across in Del Rio last month, leading to chaos as 15,000 people camped out under an international bridge waiting to be taken into federal custody.

Renae Eze, spokeswoman for Gov. Greg Abbott, told the Washington Examiner on Monday the state has deployed thousands of National Guard and Department of Public Safety troopers to the border over the past seven months, though she did not state how many are currently on border duties. More than 1,000 DPS officers were sent to Del Rio in late September for the first surge, a DPS official revealed during a press conference last week.

“Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy,” Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote in a post to Twitter over the weekend. “They are working with the Texas Dept. of Public Safety to seal surge locations at the border & arrest trespassers.”

Haitian migrants are not traveling as a single group or caravan but working with cartels to go through Central America and Mexico to enter the U.S. Previous large groups that headed from Central America to the border ranged from several hundred people to 10,000.

Migrants traveling to the U.S. southern border from South American countries — such as Brazil and Chile, where tens of thousands of Haitians have legally resided for years but are now leaving in hopes of getting into the U.S. — must travel through Panama to get into Central America and proceed north. Panama serves as a bottleneck between the two continents.

Panama Foreign Minister Erika Mouynes said in September that the country “sounded the alarm” about the unprecedented spike in migration but that the Biden administration has not responded to its alert. Another 60,000 Haitians are headed to the U.S. beyond the 20,000 who made it to Del Rio last month. Another 30,000 Haitian migrants are in Colombia attempting to cross the border into Panama.

"We've engaged with every single authority that we can think of, that we can come across, to say, 'Please, let's pay attention to this,'" Mouynes told Axios.

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“I’ve never seen this,” Abbott said during a radio interview on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show on Sept. 29. “We have multiple reports about different caravans coming to different regions across the border. And so what we’re going to do in response to it as we are preparing, as we speak, is exactly what you saw at the apex moment when people were coming across the river in Del Rio.”

Abbott cited a multistep process for responding to the groups as they arrive. As was done in Del Rio, hundreds of police and military vehicles will line up along the border to deter people from crossing and detain people who attempt to cross.

When the Department of Public Safety and National Guard moved to Del Rio nearly two weeks ago, migrants stopped crossing at the international bridge. Instead, they went upstream and downstream to cross where police were not present. The state is first focused on identifying where the groups will attempt to cross before setting up barricades and lining up parked vehicles.

"When the recent caravan of thousands of Haitian migrants crossed into Del Rio, Governor Abbott surged additional law enforcement personnel to the region and directed the National Guard and DPS to create a steel barrier with hundreds of their vehicles and humvees to deter further crossings," Eze wrote in an email. "This successful strategy, which Border Patrol agents have credited for stopping the flow of Haitian migrants, will be utilized for other caravans headed towards our southern border. Texas will continue surging state resources and stepping up in the federal government’s absence to secure our border and protect Texans.”

DPS declined to disclose the exact number of personnel dispatched to the border as part of this latest initiative. The Texas National Guard did not respond to a request for comment.

State troopers and local law enforcement cannot arrest illegal immigrants for suspected immigration violations, which are only enforceable by federal police. However, the state moved in June to arrest people who violate trespassing laws, a state offense prosecutable at the county level.

“We stepped up and created our own court system in south Texas, where we are arresting and processing and then jailing people who are coming across the border for criminal trespass,” Abbott said in the radio interview. “Because I declared a disaster in this region along the border, it immediately elevates the time in jail and the penalties for trespass in the state of Texas and it turns it into a six-month to a year behind bar penalty."

The state made available several thousand jail cells, and more than 1,000 people were in jail as of late September.

But Texas alone will struggle to arrest as many people as the federal government thinks could illegally cross in October. Beyond the 60,000 Haitians expected in the coming weeks, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is concerned up to 400,000 could be encountered illegally crossing this month if border protocols are lifted, NBC reported.

The 400,000 figure would be roughly 10 times higher than the average month over the past decade and far beyond the 78,000 in January when President Joe Biden took office