Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t handling the influx of migrants, transported one bus at a time, into her city very well. In fact, she’s having a meltdown. Despite the fact that she usually boasts of the sanctuary city status of D.C., she declared a public emergency on Thursday. Texas border sheriffs and officials call it a bunch of political grandstanding.
Bowser should not expect any sympathy from the sheriffs who have been dealing with Biden’s border crisis for almost two years. They have seen two million illegal migrants while Bowser has only seen a few thousand step-off buses in her city. Spare them the crocodile tears, Mayor. The migrants bused to Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago are sent in an orderly fashion in small numbers. Governors Abbott and Ducey are making a point that sanctuary cities should be welcoming the buses, instead of expecting border states to carry the burden of Biden’s border crisis alone.
Mayor Bowser declared a public emergency due to the buses arriving from Texas and Arizona. Washington, D.C. will create an Office of Migrant Services to provide migrants with accommodation, health care, transportation, and other services. Shouldn’t a sanctuary city already have such an office?
“We’re putting in place a framework that would allow us to have a coordinated response with our partners,” Bowser said Thursday. “This will include a program to meet all buses, and given that most people will move on, our primary focus is to make sure we have a humane, efficient, welcome process that will allow people to move on to their final destination.”
So, she recklessly declared the city a sanctuary city yet there was no “framework” to handle them. Bowser admitted that the migrants aren’t going to be staying there. This isn’t a long-term situation for her to deal with, as it is along the southern border. Illegal migrants arrive in D.C. and soon leave after making arrangements to get to wherever it is they want to go. Yet, Bowser wants federal assistance, even the National Guard, to handle 50 or 60 people getting off the buses at a time. Sounds like political grandstanding, eh?
"They have seen nothing. They are not a border town. They don't know what a border town is," Goliad County, Texas, Sheriff Roy Boyd told Fox News Digital.
“I think it’s all a bunch of political grandstanding, trying to get themselves some attention and squeeze a little bit of money out of the federal government or somewhere else that they can use for whatever they think it’s needed for,” Boyd said. “If they want to see what it looks like. They can come down here for us. It’s being shoved on us by the federal government and their policies and their lack of enforcement.”
Boyd is one of a number of sheriffs and border officials saying D.C. and New York are just getting a taste of what they have experienced daily since the crisis began.
“‘Welcome to our world’ is what they say,” Jonathan Thompson, executive director and CEO of the National Sheriffs’ Association told Fox News Digital. “Welcome to the everyday problems we are facing, and you have been ignoring and that you continue to want to blame someone else for.”
“The sheriffs on the border right now are living this every day,” Retired Texas Sheriff Clint McDonald, the executive director of the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition, told Fox News Digital. “And they’ve been criticized for asking for help with what they’re going through. And now that major cities are starting to feel this pressure, it seems to be a whole different scenario for them than it is for the people who live it every day.”
You know who else isn’t getting any help from the federal government? The border sheriffs and law enforcement officials. DHS Secretary Mayorkas said at a recent gathering of the woke in Colorado that the border is secure. Kamala Harris, the border czar (wink, wink), told Chuck Todd the border is secure in an interview for Meet the Press that aired Sunday morning. The bit of jaw-dropping denial is what border sheriffs get, not visits from Kamala to see the Biden border crisis or herself. She doesn’t care. Let’s look at a little bit of the transcript from that show, taped in Houston on Friday as Kamala toured NASA Johnson Space Center.
CHUCK TODD: Final topic here. Since we’re here in Texas, I want to ask you about the border. Would you call the border secure?
VICE PRES. KAMALA HARRIS: I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do, the first request we made: pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship. The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.
CHUCK TODD: We’re going to have two million people cross this border for the first time ever. You’re confident this border’s secure?
VICE PRES. KAMALA HARRIS: We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years. We also have to put into place a law and a plan for a pathway for citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship. We don’t have that in place because people are playing politics in a state like this and in Congress. By the way, you want to talk about bipartisanship on an issue that at one time was a bipartisan issue both in terms of Republican senators and even presidents.
I have zero professional respect for Chuck Todd. I think he’s a puppet for the DNC. But credit when credit is due. He at least asked her about the border, though it was the tail end of the interview. You could see from his face that even he couldn’t believe the whopper she was telling about border security.
First, Harris contends that the administration’s decision to make a secure border a priority means the border is now secure, which is akin to asserting that wanting to have something means you have it. If the border were secure, U.S. Customs and Border Protection would not be regularly experiencing more than 200,000 encounters per month.
Second, Harris perhaps lapses into 2020 campaign-trail autopilot, lamenting, “there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.” Harris and the rest of the Biden administration have been on the job for 600 days, or one year and almost eight months. If the problem really has gotten worse over the past four years, almost half of that has been on Harris’s watch.
Karen Bass previously said that she felt ’safe’ in Los Angeles and would rate her safety as a ’ten.’
But the numbers tell a different story. Throughout most of 2020, attempts to cross the U.S. southwestern border were particularly low, in part because of the Trump administration’s stricter enforcement policies, and in part because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The “deterioration” didn’t really occur over the past four years; the surge of migrants arrived in the opening months of the Biden administration.
Third, Harris seems to assert that lots of people are attempting to cross the U.S. southwestern border because of a lack of a path to citizenship, when if anything, it is the opposite: The possibility of an amnesty and a path to citizenship to those here illegally is a factor that makes crossing the border more tempting. If the U.S. government is going to offer a path to citizenship to those in the country illegally, a migrant will want to get to the U.S. as quickly as possible, to ensure they qualify for that path to citizenship, lest the offer expire or change in the future.
Fourth, the reason that there is not a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already is not that “people are playing politics in a state like this and in Congress” but because there is not a sufficient political consensus in support of the idea. Supporters often like to point to surveys indicating majority support for the idea, but then Americans go and elect lawmakers who do not support it, or who do not support it without other policy concessions, such as significant improvements in border security. Notice Harris cannot bring herself to acknowledge that there could be some legitimate, good-faith skepticism or opposition to the idea of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants; the opposition is simply “people playing politics.”
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