Send in the troops! Biden’s border theater
Byron York
SEND IN THE TROOPS! BIDEN’S BORDER THEATER. On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced that President Joe Biden has ordered 1,500 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, where the end of Title 42 is expected to bring a crush of new illegal border crossers. Title 42 is the Trump-era rule that allowed the United States to turn back crossers to prevent the spread of COVID.
Troops to the border! Just the sound of it suggests Biden is finally, finally getting tough on the mess he has created there. But remember this about the Biden administration and the border: Republicans want to send forces to the border to stop, or dramatically slow, the flow of illegal crossers. The Biden administration wants to send forces there to accommodate the flow of illegal crossers.
That’s a huge difference. And that is what the new troop announcement is about. The troops will not be involved in enforcing the law at the border; that’s not the role of the U.S. military. Instead, they will perform “support tasks” for Customs and Border Protection officials, according to a Pentagon spokesman, until CBP can hire enough civilian contractors to do the job. “These 1,500 military personnel … will fill critical capability gaps such as ground-based detection and monitoring, data entry, and warehouse support until CBP can address these needs through contracted support,” Army Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told the press on Tuesday.
It should also be pointed out that there are already U.S. troops on the border — 2,500 of them. The new arrivals will bring total U.S. military on the border to around 4,000. And all of them are helping U.S. officials process the illegal border crossers, nearly all of whom have no legitimate claim to asylum, into the U.S. That, and “warehouse support.”
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Five years ago, then-President Donald Trump sent 5,200 troops to the border to help enforce policies that prevented illegal crossers from staying in the country — again, not law enforcement, but support of Trump policies such as the Remain In Mexico edict. Many Democrats went nuts. In November 2018, 108 House Democrats wrote a letter to then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to charge that the Trump administration was militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The United States can maintain a secure border and the rule of law while still upholding our country’s values to protect those fleeing persecution and violence,” the House Democrats wrote. “The use of military personnel, however, will not help us meet this challenge and only exacerbates the potential to unnecessarily escalate the situation. This effort is nothing short of a militarization of the southern border to score political points and stoke misleading fears among Americans regarding immigrants.”
Now, a Democratic president has raised the number of troops at the border to 4,000, and while some Democrats have criticized Biden’s move, for many others, it’s OK. We don’t know for sure, but there might be some partisanship involved in their silence.
Biden administration officials are also making grossly misleading claims about the border. Recently, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, “When it comes to illegal immigration, you’ve seen it come down by more than 90%. And that’s because of the actions that this president has taken.” Has Biden really cut illegal immigration by 90%? No, no, no. Jean-Pierre’s statement is completely, totally, 100% false. For one thing, look at the cries for help from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol.
On Wednesday, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz tweeted that in the previous 72 hours, agents encountered 22,220 crossers. In three days! Back in the Obama administration, officials thought 1,000 was a bad day. Now, it’s more than 7,000 a day. Jean-Pierre’s claim that the Biden administration has reduced illegal immigration by more than 90% was, in addition to being untrue, an impressive act of chutzpah.
It makes more sense to look at Jean-Pierre’s comments, and the new troop mobilization, as public relations. A presidential campaign is beginning. The administration wants to send the message that Biden is tough on illegal immigration but, at the same time, not inhumane like Trump. The White House also wants to provide talking points for Democrats — the kind who happily condemned Trump’s troop deployment as the “militarization” of the border but stay silent now.
What’s left out of that political calculation is the actual situation at the border. It is real. It is still bad. It’s going to get worse after Title 42. And one man more than any other, Biden, bears the blame for it.
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