Unmasking Biden’s COVID Hypocrisy at the Border
While warning Americans about rising COVID infections, the Biden administration continues to move sick migrants into the United States.
The incoherence is breathtaking, even for some members of the president’s own party. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, is urging the White House to stop releasing thousands of illegal aliens, many of them unvaccinated and untested for coronavirus, into the country’s interior.
Accusing the administration of “creating a public health disaster in Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, last week ordered a halt to all non-governmental transport of migrants in an effort to contain the spread of COVID.
But before troopers could start pulling over vehicles on Texas roadways, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sued the state. Oddly, he asserted that Abbott’s order was “dangerous” and somehow “exacerbating the spread of COVID-19.”
Legal wrangling over Garland’s “federal supremacy” claims notwithstanding, coronavirus cases are surging at the border. Without testing migrants for the disease, U.S. Border Patrol is sending them into communities where they will likely spread infections.
In one widely reported case, a sickened family of illegal aliens recently turned up at a Whataburger in the Rio Grande Valley town of La Joya. Holding official paperwork that gave them 60 days to reach their destination in the United States, none were wearing masks.
Such incidents point to “serious flaws in [the Department of Homeland Security’s] quarantine policies,” says the Center for Immigration Studies. “The administration is handing COVID-positive migrants over to NGOs [non-governmental organizations] with no restrictions on their movement, and no notice to local officials in the places they are housed.”
The White House continues to dodge questions on why it insists that Americans mask up and get vaccinated while infected migrants are released into the country with flimsy or non-existent health screening. This is toxic-level hypocrisy.
On the front lines, Border Patrol agents are feeling the ill effects; 80 agents tested COVID-positive in the Rio Grande Valley last week. At the same time, reports surfaced that Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services ordered workers to downplay spiking cases of COVID infections in a migrant children’s shelter at Fort Bliss, Texas.
The movement of thousands of untested migrants into the U.S. each week “absolutely endanger[s] American lives and once again shows this administration puts America last and everyone else first,” concludes Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, and a senior fellow at FAIR.