As my colleague Rick Moran and others have reported, Joe Biden is not just loosening Trump’s border control policies. He’s going farther, reinstituting what amounts to catch-and-release. It’s already having a predictable result.
Ending the MPP program invites unmitigated disaster. The migrant wave is building across the region as hope is kindled that Joe Biden will not only allow them into the United States but grant them amnesty and give them green cards to work.
There will be no order to the migration. U.S. authorities won’t be able to control it.
Jackson County (Texas) Sheriff A.J. Louderback appeared with Tucker Carlson earlier in the week, and said Biden’s policy amounts to defunding ICE by memorandum.
Abolishing ICE has been a goal of the left for several years now. Biden did not campaign on that but he seems to be on board.
Texas is responding to the growing border mess.
Gov. Greg Abbott posted a photo of himself meeting with Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw earlier this week. Abbott is promising state-level defense of the border shortly. Texas had to step up for border enforcement during the Obama years, too.
The Biden administration claims all border crossers will be tested for COVID, but is that even believable? Border Patrol lacks the capacity. Tests can take several days before results are known.
It’s not believable, and the disorder Biden is inviting at the border will bring more COVID carriers into the country through Texas and other border states. How can I say this?
Bloomberg is reporting that Mexico is now the deadliest COVID hotspot in Latin America.
(Bloomberg) — Mexico has surpassed Panama and Peru to become the deadliest spot for Covid-19 in Latin America.
A recent surge in deaths has brought the virus’s toll to 59.2 per million people, just above Panama’s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Mexico’s fatalities are now the 15th highest worldwide per capita.
And
In Mexico City, the rate of excess deaths per million people is the highest in the world, according to data analysts Mario Romero and Laurianne Despeghel. Fatalities have been 123% greater than expected in regular times, they said. At 77,469 as of Feb. 3, that’s more than twice the official virus toll of 29,146.
Where are the border migrants either from or crossing through to get to the U.S. border? The only land route is through Mexico.
Put a finger on the two stories we’ve discussed so far — Biden is weakening control of the border, and Mexico is a COVID mess right now.
Florida is not a COVID mess right now. It’s faring slightly better than its large state counterparts, New York and California, despite having an older population than both. Both of the latter have imposed harsh lockdowns, while Florida has stayed relatively open. California and New York are Democrat states. Florida is a Republican state.
The Biden administration is mulling the possibility of closing some states including Florida because of the new UK variant (which the Biden admin allows us to say) of the China virus (which Biden banned saying through executive order).
The Biden administration is considering whether to impose domestic travel restrictions, including on Florida, fearful that coronavirus mutations are threatening to reverse hard-fought progress on the pandemic.
Outbreaks of the new variants — including a highly contagious one first identified in the United Kingdom, as well as others from South Africa and Brazil that scientists worry can evade existing vaccines — have lent urgency to a review of potential travel restrictions within the United States, one federal official said.
Discussions in the administration over potential travel restrictions do not target a specific state but focus on how to prevent the spread of variants that appear to be surging in a number of states, including Florida and California.
Take the three stories together, as any leader in a position to make decisions should. Foster chaos at the border at the same moment Mexico is a COVID hotspot (to say nothing of the impact of more cheap labor on a deeply damaged economy), but clamp down on Americans’ right to freely travel.
The most charitable view is that Biden just doesn’t know what he’s doing. Another view is that he or those around him pulling the strings know exactly what they’re doing.
When Trump was president and there was just a discussion of quarantining New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) went full insurrectionist revolutionary.
But that was almost a year ago in the “two weeks to flatten the curve” we’ve all lived with thanks to China. Biden is president now.
And he’s mulling shutting down American states while the border gets worse due directly to his policies. Would those states be justified in reacting as Cuomo did?
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