‘Closed’ Border Farce Takes the Stage as Title 42 Curtain Lifts
In the run-up to the lifting of Title 42 public-health protocols this week, the Border Patrol is expecting 700,000 migrants sheltering in Mexico to flood this country. And there’s much more to come as huge surges in northbound traffic are being reported across Central America.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appears unfazed, or perhaps confused. “The border is not open, it has not been open, and it will not be open subsequent to May 11,” he blithely declared in Texas last week.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Mayorkas’ risible statement a “flat-out lie or total ignorance. Everybody in America knows that the border is not closed.”
On Sunday, aerial cameras showed a massive line snaking across the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas. In the first four days of May, more than 8,000 asylum seekers had made their way into the U.S. from Mexico, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources.
Up to 14,000 daily crossings are projected border-wide when Title 42 expires on Thursday. The emergency measure had authorized the rapid expulsion of some 2.8 million migrants since March 2020.
With the administration canceling Title 42 Abbott ridiculed President Joe Biden’s token deployment of 1,500 National Guardsmen to the border. He dismissed it as a paper-pushing exercise that’s “a day late and tens of thousands of soldiers too few.”
In fact, Texas has at various times stationed up to 10,000 guard troops along its 1,254-mile border with Mexico. But as with Biden’s smaller contingent, guardsmen are not authorized to repel or remove illegal aliens; instead, they serve only in an observe-and-support capacity.
“The theatrics by Biden will not prevent a single person from being processed and released into the United States. This is complete disregard for the law.” Chris Russo, president of Texans for Strong Borders, told FAIR in an interview last week.
In his kabuki theater, Mayorkas’ cast of players (Border Patrol, CBP, National Guard, etc.) will expedite the movement of migrants across the “closed” border in a ploy to minimize unsightly border backups that might garner more bad optics and negative press.
But there’s no covering up the farce. Cartels and migrants from across the globe know what’s going on. With the Title 42 hurdle removed, no one is stopping them.