Crisis at the Border, by Will Wright-Clickbait!

 

There's no

CRISIS AT THE
BORDER

... so shut up

By Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Immigration Editor Emma Goldman

Now that the media can't spend all day quoting the Former Loser Grifter's Tweets and manufacturing stories about them, they are casting about for other nonsense to fill their websites and cable TV news slots.  We can't think of any other explanation for the sudden spate of stories about a supposed Crisis at the Border.

Here's a too-representative bad example, from people who really should know better, The Washington Post's Immigration Team: 

MCALLEN, Tex. — President Biden's more-welcoming message to immigrants is facing an immediate challenge along the Mexican border, where Central American families and children have been crossing in numbers that point to a building crisis.

In recent days, U.S. authorities have seen the return of large groups of parents and children crossing the border in the darkness, a replay of scenes that occurred during the record influx of families who arrived in 2018 and 2019, overwhelming migrant shelters and Border Patrol stations.

Republican critics of Biden say the new wave is the start of the crisis they have long predicted, invited by the new administration’s eager rejection of Trump’s deterrent approach.  

What's the crisis here? 

Desperate children seeking safety in the U.S. hardly strikes us as a crisis.  A crisis is a rampaging epidemic that has killed 500,000 Americans and almost 2,000 every day as hard-right idiots like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (Q) tell his constituents to abandon basic public health measures.  A crisis is the collapse of a state's electric power system, leading to scores freezing to death and billions of dollars of damage, not to mention millions still without safe drinking water, all thanks to the inaction of hard-right idiots like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (Q).

Here's the latest from the same Post team: 

As the Biden administration races to find shelter for a fast-growing migration surge along the Mexico border, they are handling the influx primarily as a capacity challenge. The measures they have taken are aimed accommodating the increase, not to contain it or change the upward trend.

Contain the increase? What does that mean?

Actually we know exactly what that means: it describes the illegal anti-immigrant policies of the disgraced Former Loser Grifter Administration and their hate-addled henchmen, chief among them Stephen Miller. 

Let's have a look at what is really going on at the U.S.-Mexican border:

The last group of the refugee camp in Matamoros! My friend Angel also known as “negro” is crossing with his family to the US! Every day he would ask me “y yo cuando madre?” “Hoy negro! Hoy es el día! Bienvenido a Estados Unidos!” ♥️ pic.twitter.com/bgS1rSEuaD

— Norma Seni Pimentel (@nspimentel) March 5, 2021

Pretty scary, no?

For those of you who have dropped the last four years down the old Memory Hole, let's review the bidding.  Elected on a platform of white supremacy and nativist hatred, the Former Loser Grifter moved to clamp down on what he saw as the menace of undocumented border-crossers by instituting a number of illegal and immoral anti-immigrant measures, like turning away all comers at border crossings, including those who had the right to claim asylum and be let in to the U.S., at least temporarily (the so-called Migrant Protection Program or MPP), and more recently on the pretext of protecting Americans against COVID-19 (and a heckuva job the Qpublicans did with that!) kicking all border crossers back into Mexico, again without legal basis.

As a result of these unlawful actions, and the continued suffering of the people of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatamala, which was caused by corrupt dictators and societies broken by past U.S. intervention, tens of thousands of suffering would-be immigrants, many women and children, were left to rot and die in dangerous border towns, like Matamoros, Mexico.

To The Washington Post and other media outlets, this mighty river of human suffering was not a crisis because it involved invisible refugees suffering in Mexico and was not fluffed constantly by Qpublican hate-mongers and their various media mouthpieces.

It seemed like a crisis to the mother and children, though.  A survey conducted by Physicians for Human Rights found:

 

Numbers on a slide don't really do it, though.  Here's a story from the same survey:

Natalia and her young daughter, Maria, fled domestic and political violence in Central America, only to be subjected to MPP when they sought asylum at the U.S. border. Sent back to Mexico, they were abducted by a criminal organization. Natalia was abducted a second time while Maria hid herself in a stove.

The second time she was abducted, Natalia was separated from Maria and only later found out that her daughter had escaped to the United States, crossing the border as an unaccompanied child.

Of the first kidnapping, Maria states that:

“When we were heading to the store, three men with their faces covered placed a gun to my head and my mother’s head…. They would come and take my mother all the time. They would ask her to dress pretty and they would come get her. My mother would tell me not to scream or cry and just to hide when she was not there. She would ask me to cover my ears and my eyes as well.… I have a lot of nightmares in which I am taken from my mother’s side. I dream of people coming after me with guns and they kill me. I have an ongoing dream where I am in the park and I see two men coming after me and shooting me. I see my body filled with blood and, in the dream, I find myself running to a house in construction and hiding there scared while the men continue to search for me.”

Briefs filed in Federal Court summarize the plight of the plaintiffs thusly:

As of the end of March 2020, DHS had returned around 28,500 migrants to Mexico pursuant to MPP-Tamaulipas, including hundreds of children. See . . .Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, through Mar. 2020; . . . .Large numbers of these asylum seekers have been subject to physical violence, kidnapping, sexual violence and other crimes. See Gilman Decl. ¶¶ 43-45 (citing study that found 80 percent of surveyed migrants in Nuevo Laredo to have suffered at least one violent incident during the first nine months of 2019); Leutert Decl. ¶¶ 29-43 (summarizing reports of violence in Matamoros, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo); Goodwin Decl. ¶¶ 11-23 (describing targeting of migrants in Matamoros for kidnappings, extortion, rape, robbery and assault); HRF Decl. ¶¶ 11-15 (describing trends in Tamaulipas), 20-24 (same for Matamoros), 26-32 (same for Nuevo Laredo); . . . 

Horror stories like these do not constitute a crisis in the minds of The Washington Post and Qpublicans everywhere.

So let's go back and look at the supposed “crisis.”

As a result of the illegal Former Loser Grifter Administration policies, there's a backlog of persons seeking to cross the U.S. border. To the extent this backlog presents as a “crisis,” it's a crisis caused by the illegal acts of the FLG Administration.

The way to resolve this supposed crisis is to quickly and efficiently process those waiting at the border, starting with the most desperate – unaccompanied minors and women with children. Give them COVID tests.  Release the children to their sponsors and relatives in the U.S.. Women and families should be evaluated for plausible asylum claims (like Maria's) and released with Immigration Court dates.  In cases where CBP reasonably believes that the families may not show up in court, put GPS monitors on the adults.

Crisis averted, right?

Chaos at the border, Eagle Pass Dep't

It depends on what you think the crisis is. If it's that the volume of border crossers exceeds the facilities available, add facilities.

That's not really what Qpublicans and the anti-immigrant hatemongers infecting the U.S. immigration agencies think is the crisis. To them, the crisis isn't a tsunami of humanity at the border (although that's good for whipping up hysteria).  The crisis is that the folks travel to the different places in the United States and – live.  

Yes, it's true: when immigrants are let into the United States, they live in the United States, often doing the work that Sean Hannity wouldn't sully his hands with, like mowing Mitt Romney's lawns or carving up chicken for your 20-piece buckets.

Or perhaps the border crisis is that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (Q - he's back) is trying to blame border crossers for the forthcoming rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths actually caused by his own fact-free decision to drop the state's mask mandates and restrictions on indoor saloons. That would explain his otherwise senseless decision to reject federal aid to test migrants.

Is the border being overwhelmed?  The Washington Post tells us that up to 4,000 migrants including 450 unaccompanied children are apprehended by border cops a day.   According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, last fiscal year (with the Canadian border mostly closed), 444,541 people crossed U.S. land borders a day.  Can the border guards really not handle an additional 1% without pissing and moaning about it?  

The point is that there's only a crisis at the border if the media create one, or amplify the tendentious claims of anti-immigrant persecutors and thirsty hacks desperate to distract from their own incompetence and lack of leadership, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (Q).  If that in turn frustrates real immigration reform and a return to the Former Loser Grifter era of gratuitous cruelty, that would be a crisis.  

Not to mention an entirely preventable human tragedy. 

And we've had enough of those already.