OPINION:
There’s no shortage of news relating to illegal immigration these days. Every time a new statistic is released, it seems the number of illegal border crossings has increased, crime has escalated and the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. has grown. But now the numbers are skyrocketing.
This February was the worst at the border in 22 years with 164,973 illegal immigrants apprehended — a 63% increase more than last February and a 280% increase from the average number of apprehensions during the Trump era. The U.S. has lost track of 500,000 illegal immigrants since Mr. Biden took office with border officials saying on a good day, they’re 50% effective.
And while crime against Americans increases, the increased danger and harmful consequences for illegal migrants and children by human smugglers are also becoming a humanitarian concern. In Texas, 40 illegal immigrants were found locked inside freezing train cars by human smugglers, and in another incident, a human smuggler carrying 62 illegal immigrants in a tanker crashed into multiple law enforcement vehicles while evading capture.
Amid this chaos, one thing the Biden administration is apparently not concerned about is the spread of COVID-19 — at least when it gets in the way of legalizing illegal immigration.
President Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now effectively arguing that COVID-19 is not a health risk when it comes to unaccompanied child migrants.
The CDC’s announcement came last Friday after a federal judge’s ruling in Texas said the administration could not continue to exempt children from an expulsion policy known as Title 42, which was enacted in March 2020 during the Trump era. The statute requires illegal immigrants to be denied entry at the border to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in immigration detention facilities, even when they are seeking asylum. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has justified the move, saying that HHS has measures in place to mitigate the spread of the virus by using plexiglass dividers, enhanced ventilation systems and testing.
Simply put, we need to worry about American children spreading COVID-19 in schools with educators, but we don’t need to worry about migrant children spreading it in immigration detention centers with law enforcement and medical personnel. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist — or virologist — to know that such Orwellian logic, which seems to be the hallmark epistemology of the Biden administration, is stunningly irrational.
Now, Senate Democrats are urging the White House to scrap Title 42 altogether, which would spark a “mass migration event,” Axios reported on Thursday. U.S. intelligence officials are predicting more than 170,000 migrants at the Mexico border if Title 42 is lifted, and that 25,000 migrants are already waiting in Mexican shelters just south of the border biding their time until the COVID-19 policy is removed.
“Internal discussions have raised alarms that human trafficking networks throughout Mexico and Central America will exploit the situation to ‘generate a mass migration event,’” Axios said, citing unnamed U.S. government sources.
The CDC reassesses the need for Title 42 every 60 days and its next deadline is in early April. Last week Reuters reported Mr. Biden was “leaning toward,” ending Title 42 itself, and BuzzFeed News obtained a draft document from the Department of Homeland Security laying out U.S. plans to brief Mexico about ending the policy. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in Mexico this week to address immigration and public safety issues with his Mexican counterparts.
It’s not hard to read the tea leaves here. The illegal immigration numbers we saw in February will be nothing compared to what we will see later this spring when the Biden administration goes full open borders and ends the only stop-gap it had: Title 42.
A massive humanitarian crisis will follow.
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