V.P. Harris Says ‘We Have to Address the Root Causes of Migration’
By Craig Bannister | March 25, 2021 | 10:49am EDT
“We have to address the root causes of migration,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday, after President Joe Biden put her in charge of dealing with the crisis at the U.S. southwest border.
Harris made the vague pronouncement Wednesday night, tweeting that the task “won’t be easy”:
“.@POTUS asked me to lead our diplomatic work with Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. To address the situation at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of migration. It won’t be easy work—but it's necessary.”
Both The Wall Street Journal and USA Today report that Harris also made the claim while speaking with reporters at the White House earlier in the day – without specifying the “root causes”:
"While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law, and that we also, because we can chew gum and walk at the same time, must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek."
Politico reports that administration officials also told reporters that Harris will focus on “the root causes of immigration,” with no mention of what those might be:
Harris’ main focus, a senior administration official told reporters earlier Wednesday, will be two-pronged: working to slow the flow of “irregular migrants” by addressing “the root causes” that prompt them to leave their home countries as well as strengthening relationships with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries where the bulk of the migrants arriving at the U.S. border come from.
….
On the call with reporters, aides made clear that Harris would not be owning the entire immigration portfolio for the administration and would be instead focused on long-term efforts in Central America.
“[Harris] is going to be focused on overseeing our diplomatic efforts, working closely with these nations to look at the issues of migration and their own enforcement on their own borders," the senior administration official said. "More broadly, though, she's going to be working to implement a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration.”
Pres. Biden alluded to "many factors as to why people leave in the first place," when he handed the immigration problem over to Harris at Wednesday’s press conference. He said that, back when he was vice president, he thought that the reasons “so many people” were coming to the U.S. included gang violence, trafficking by cartels, and natural disasters.
Illegals for Biden
A voter drive masquerades as a border incursion.
Never was the saying that Democrats import the electorate they prefer more obviously true than in recent days as Biden campaign flag-waving future Democrat voters overwhelmed the nation’s southern border at the invitation of the Biden-Harris regime.
Having ceded whites and blue-collar voters to Republicans, Democrats and their placeholder president who can barely climb the stairs to Air Force One, are mobilizing armies of illegal aliens from Latin America. They do this as a failsafe in case their signature legislation, H.R. 1, the proposed “For the People Act,” which would gut the First Amendment and turn America into a one-party state, fails to become law.
The people crashing the border and setting up camps near it make no effort to conceal their enthusiasm for the Democrats who want to do away with the U.S. border altogether. They want the massive amnesty Joe Biden promised them.
A man who crossed the border from Mexico at Tucson, Arizona, told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he “basically” did so because Biden is now president.
“Would you have tried to do this when Donald Trump was president?” Raddatz asked the man.
“Definitely not,” the man replied.
Breitbart News published photos of “Biden for President 2020” flags displayed at a migrant tent city close to the border in Tijuana, Mexico, as the future Democrat voters await U.S. immigration processing. No doubt many of them will head for Democrat-controlled so-called sanctuary cities.
Under Biden-Harris, no one new is being enrolled in the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program that required non-Mexican asylum-seekers appearing at the southern border to wait in Mexico for their claims to be adjudicated. The program, part of the Migrant Protection Protocols enforced by Trump, discouraged individuals from making fraudulent asylum claims.
These Migrant Protection Protocols, which were approved by Congress and signed into law during the Clinton administration, had not been used until then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced in December 2018 that they would be implemented. The goal, she said at the time, was to curtail the so-called catch-and-release system, in which individuals made fraudulent asylum claims knowing they would be allowed into the United States and would be able to stay for years before their court appearance.
“Aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, where many skip their court dates. Instead, they will wait for an immigration court decision while they are in Mexico,” Nielsen said at the time.
Under Biden, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memorandum providing that, effective January 21, it “will suspend new enrollments in the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), pending further review of the program. Aliens who aren’t already enrolled in MPP should be processed under other existing legal authorities.”
On February 2, Biden signed three new executive orders aimed at undoing Trump-era immigration policies. One of the documents, Biden said during a ceremony at the White House, “orders a full review of the previous administration’s harmful and counterproductive immigration policies, basically across the board.”
The Biden junta has done everything but roll out the red carpet for uninvited foreigners who now get VIP treatment, being placed in motels to await processing while the National Guard needlessly stationed around the United States Capitol complex are fed sickening food and given lousy accommodations.
“The Biden administration isn’t addressing a crisis, they’re exacerbating it,” said RJ Hauman, government relations director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), according to Fox News.
“This is yet another message that will be heard loud and clear by human smugglers and everyone in Central America — keep coming to our southern border, things will run smoothly once you get here.”
Hours after being installed as president, Biden signed Presidential Proclamation 10142, in which he declared that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution,” describing the project as “a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”
The document revoked Trump’s Presidential Proclamation 9844 of Feb. 15, 2019, that declared a national emergency concerning the Southern border and invoked the National Emergencies Act. Trump ordered $2.5 billion in military drug interdiction funds redirected to the wall construction project on the southern border.
And those cages near the border for kids installed by the Obama-Biden administration but dishonestly blamed on the Trump-Pence administration are back again under the Biden-Harris junta.
Biden-Harris has implemented a “catch and release” program under which border crossers are ushered into the country on an expedited basis. Officials don’t bother issuing these individuals with the standard Notice to Appear requiring them to make a court appearance.
At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress last week his department has released border crossers into the interior without bothering to test them for the COVID-19 virus.
Mayorkas, by the way, denies there is a crisis at the border. He prefers to call it a “challenge,” while disingenuously blaming everything that is going wrong on former President Trump.
“It is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration,” Mayorkas said on CNN as he invented facts out of thin air. “There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration.”
Meanwhile, immigration officials caught almost 100,000 border crossers in February, up 170 percent over February 2020. More than 118,000 illegal aliens have crossed the border undetected since October 2020, Breitbart News reported.
On second thought, maybe “caught” is the wrong word here.
Yes, it is definitely the wrong word.
“Placed on the illegal-alien-to-illegal-voter conveyor belt” works better.
Biden's Border Catastrophe
A disaster getting worse by the day.
No wonder Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in early March called Biden “the migrant president,” which he did not intend as a compliment. During a March 23rd press conference, Mexico’s president elaborated. "Expectations were created that with the Government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants,” he said. “And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so."
After the Biden administration re-instituted the catch and release policy that had been ended by the Trump administration, migrant families apprehended after illegally entering the United States have been quickly released. They are free to remain in this country without even being issued a court appearance date.
“This is insane, it is another pull factor that will overwhelm us,” a senior-level law enforcement source with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the Rio Grande Valley told Breitbart. “We are creating another entirely different class of aliens we will have to deal with years from now. We will never find most of these aliens once they are released.”
Some of those claiming to be families consist of children with smugglers posing as their parents. In any case, whether real or not, all families apprehended after illegally entering the United States should have been immediately turned away because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Biden administration has the emergency legal authority to do so. However, according to Axios, there is data showing that “an average of just 13% of nearly 13,000 family members attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border were returned to Mexico between March 14 and March 21 using the public health order, which essentially says the U.S. can close the border to nonessential travel because of the coronavirus.”
To make matters worse, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has confirmed that there have been “instances” when aliens who crossed our border illegally were released without testing them for the coronavirus. There were cases in which illegal aliens who had tested positive were nevertheless released into U.S. communities.
Mayorkas’s claim that the Biden administration has “closed” the border with Mexico to migrant families is a preposterous lie. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki repeated this lie at her March 22nd press briefing.
All of this is happening as thousands of unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally are being welcomed with open arms by the Biden administration. The administration was completely unprepared for the chaos that has followed. As of mid-March, more than 13,000 unaccompanied minors were reportedly in U.S. custody, overwhelming CBP resources. There is not enough space to house them temporarily in Border Patrol facilities until they can be safely transferred to facilities operated by the better equipped Department of Health and Human Services. The situation is so bad that the minors are being crammed together in ramshackle quarters, in numbers way beyond their stated capacity limits, with no regard to the risk of coronavirus spread. The minors lie on floor mats with a foil sheet for covers.
According ABC News, internal CBP documents it obtained show there are now 3,889 migrants in a holding facility in Donna, Texas that is meant to hold just 250. “That means it is currently at 1,556% capacity.”
The Biden administration has prohibited journalists from visiting or photographing where these minors, who shouldn’t be in the U.S. in the first place, are being held. The administration is covering up the shocking extent of the humanitarian and health crisis it has created. A prominent photojournalist, John Moore, tweeted: “I respectfully ask US Customs and Border Protection to stop blocking media access to their border operations. I have photographed CBP under Bush, Obama and Trump but now - zero access is granted to media.”
In response to repeated media requests for such access, all that the White House would say is that it is “working to finalize details” of a plan to allow some press access.
Biden administration officials continue to refuse to even acknowledge that there is a crisis. The administration remains in full spin mode. Psaki, for example, claimed that “children presenting at our border who are fleeing violence … who are fleeing terrible situations, is not a crisis.”
Yes, there are horrible economic conditions and violence in Central America, which parents want their children to escape. But it is a crisis when such desperate Central American parents are encouraged enough by Biden’s undoing of the Trump administration’s strict immigration policies to put their children in the hands of dangerous smugglers. It is a crisis when such children may never get to the border safely because of disease, violent attacks, or sex trafficking.
“We’re dealing with a different culture who’s not afraid to send all their kids under the age of five, knowing they’re going to get raped, knowing they’re going to get killed,” a border agent told The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity. “You talk to the adults or the teenagers and they’ll tell you, ‘They raped three or four girls, and they kicked them off the trains.’ They’re going to die.”
Those minors lucky enough to make it safely to the U.S-Mexico border are vastly overwhelming the resources available to take care of them after they have crossed illegally into this country. Hence, the inhumane conditions facing the children, just as they thought the worst was behind them. A picture is a worth a thousand words, as photos made available by Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar's office of the horrible living conditions demonstrate.
Despite its denials, the Biden administration has sent strong signals through its actions that encourage migrants to come to our country illegally, especially unaccompanied minors. The pull is too great to resist.
Who has Biden just tasked with trying to stem the flow of migrants from Central America? It’s Vice President Kamala Harris, of course. Biden claimed that Harris was the most qualified person to take on this job. Based on what? Harris has no experience either in diplomacy or immigration matters. It was just the other day when Harris laughed in response to a question whether she had plans to visit the border.
Harris is supposed to oversee the infusion of billions of dollars into the economies of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in an attempt to reduce the poverty and violence that are fueling the migration surge. She will fail just as then-Vice President Biden did during the Obama administration. American taxpayers’ money will go down the money pits of these corrupt regimes.
President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras, for example, was linked to alleged involvement with Honduras’s drug-trafficking industry during a federal trial in New York. The trial was of a Honduran citizen who was convicted on March 22nd on various counts, including conspiracy to traffic cocaine. The New York Times reported that “evidence presented in court over two weeks provided a searing assessment of the president, whose government’s failure to build a lawful state and a robust economy has helped drive hundreds of thousands of despairing citizens to emigrate in recent years, with most trying to reach the United States.” Yet Biden’s solution is to send Harris down to Honduras and other corrupt Central American countries with bucketsful of cash. This would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.
It is a dereliction of duty for the president of the United States to potentially endanger the health and security of the American people he is sworn to protect by stimulating an uncontrollable surge of illegal immigrants into this country. And it is cruel for the Biden administration to lure unaccompanied minors to take a very treacherous journey north with no idea of what awaits them. The right thing to do for all concerned is for the Biden administration to send an unambiguous message that those crossing into the United States illegally, including children, will be promptly sent home in a safe and humane manner.
Photo: Associated Press
No comments:
Post a Comment