Biden at the Border: Let Migrants Pass Through El Paso (and Beyond)
President Joe Biden’s three-hour stopover in El Paso on Sunday was like a whirlwind tour of a Potemkin Village, or Alice in Wonderland. In a city flooded with illegal aliens, he saw none except when his motorcade drove alongside the border.
Asked to explain the thinking behind a visit to an oddly empty migrant services center, a senior administration official shrugged: “There just weren’t any [migrants] there when he arrived. Completely coincidental.”
With blinders firmly secured, Biden conveniently skirted places like El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, where hundreds of migrants sleep on sidewalks outside Sacred Heart Church, which border transients fill to overflowing nightly.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who did his boss’ field prep work during a trip to the city last month, made it clear that cosmetic stage management – not actual border enforcement – is Job One.
Mayorkas touted a phone app, CBP One, which, he said, will enable migrants to make an appointment to enter the U.S. at ports of entry like El Paso and move into the country. “We’re trying to incentivize them to come to the ports of entry instead of in between the points of entry,” he said.
“So much more efficient than wading across the Rio Grande,” wryly noted Washington Examiner columnist Byron York. What would be even more efficient would be to require prospective migrants to make an appointment at their nearest U.S. embassy or consulate and avoid a needless trek to a border crossing if they don’t qualify for entry.
The problem is that the White House has no legal authority to do this. “It is a gross violation of the narrow, statutory parole authority Congress has granted, and an unconstitutional usurpation by the president of Congress’s power to set the conditions for lawful entry into the United States,” Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review (behind a paywall).
And speaking of walls, it was ironic to see Biden posing at a section of border barrier. “The president used the occasion for a photo-op in front of the highly effective border wall he unilaterally scrapped on his first day in office,” said Mark Morgan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a senior fellow at FAIR.
After two years of dismantling immigration enforcement and presiding over a historic border crisis, Biden now assures a credulous media that he’s riding to El Paso’s rescue.
“They need a lot of resources. We’re going to get it for them,” Biden declared, without a trace of irony or any acknowledgment that his reckless policies created this mess. It’s a surreal combination of dissembling and fantasy that would make Grigory Potemkin and Lewis Carroll blush.