Earlier this week, tragedy struck the small South Texas town of Uvalde when a deeply disturbed 18-year-old man murdered 19 school children and 2 teachers in their classroom.
As President Joe Biden prepares to visit the devastated town on Sunday, he will not take the time to also visit the crisis-plagued border an hour away—despite this being the closest he’s come to the border since his inauguration.
In fact, Uvalde is located just over an hour away from both Del Rio and Eagle Pass, both of which have seen swaths of illegal border crossers and migrant activity. Thousands of Haitians took refuge under the Del Rio Bridge in August of last year, and Del Rio has seen 236,159 encounters this fiscal year.
Since January, the number of illegal border crossers has increased each month according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection records. In April, a record-breaking 234,088 illegal migrants were apprehended at the Southern border, up nearly 12,000 from the previous month.
Over a million arrests have occurred since the beginning of the federal fiscal year in October, and Border Patrol is well on its way to logging the projected record-breaking two million arrests by the end of this fiscal year in September.
The Biden Administration’s open border policies allowed a flood of illegal migrants into the country without any plans to turn back the tide. Instead, the Biden Administration continues attempting to repeal and work around Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42 that stemmed the flow of migrants.
Meanwhile, the Biden Administration’s encouragement to illegal border crossers is killing many of these desperate migrants—to probably a larger number than reported by Homeland Security, with at least 650 dying last year.
Nevertheless, in addition to the increasing encounters and deaths, drugs and violence continue to sweep through American cities, with U.S. Rep Steve Scalise (R-LA) telling Fox News, “every state in America is now a border state.”
“Because of President Biden’s efforts to dismantle America’s border and immigration enforcement system, drug-overdose deaths reached a new record last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that roughly two-thirds of these deaths came from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. To date, CBP has seized over 5,000 pounds of fentanyl in Fiscal Year 2022. This is enough to kill 2.4 billion people – nearly one-third of the Earth’s entire population.”
Biden and his Border Czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, have largely ignored the growing crisis.
Indeed, Harris visited the border for the first (and only) time over three months after her appointment to the post of Border Czar (and only after former President Trump announced his own plans to visit).
Due to the Biden Administration’s dereliction of duty in protecting the U.S. southern border, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton implored Texas lawmakers to act and pass legislation to protect Texas borders that will allow Paxton to challenge the current reigning precedent on state power in immigration—Arizona v U.S.—before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Current precedent does not allow for state enforcement of federal immigration law, or for individual state laws on immigration issues, which leaves southern border states in legal limbo on permitted border defense mechanisms.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s current border security push—Operation Lone Star—-is currently seeking additional funding to continue its mission to “prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal activity between the ports of entry.”
Meanwhile, as Texas shells out millions to attempt to halt illegal border activities, President Biden cannot be bothered to visit the very border crisis his administration created.
