The chaos at the border is the Democrat’s Achilles heel, and they know it. So, after making a big show of making travel plans and scheduling witnesses for a field meeting of the Homeland Security Committee In McAllen, Texas, the Democrats abruptly pulled the plug and refused to attend.
The Democrats pretended to be miffed that Republicans were going to politicize the meeting.
“Instead of a fact-finding mission to develop better border security and immigration policies, Republicans are traveling to the border to attack the Administration and try to score political points with their extreme rhetoric – despite having voted against the resources border personnel need,” Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement. “Committee Democrats are in regular contact with Department leadership and stakeholders on the ground and will be taking substantive site visits to the border – including as soon as this week.”
A spokesperson for the committee’s Republican majority disputed that characterization.
“The half-baked argument that Homeland Democrats didn’t confirm their attendance is undermined by the very fact they invited a witness, who is confirmed on our first panel, and also made their travel arrangements,” the spokesperson said. “This move from the Democrats only screams partisan games and shows that they are in fact the ones making this political.”
The star witness for the Republicans was U.S. Border Patrol chief Raúl Ortiz. He contradicted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s numerous assurances that the border is under control. When asked directly if the border was under control, Ortiz responded, “Based upon the definition you have, sir, up there, no.”
[House Homeland Security Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.)] was ready with a video clip of Mayorkas making such a comment, asking Ortiz if the secretary was lying — one of several arguments the GOP has pointed to as potential grounds for impeachment.
It was a question Ortiz largely sidestepped, noting that while four of nine southwest border sectors have significant resources, five find themselves facing “an increase in flow and that has caused a considerable strain.”
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday pushed back on the tone of hearing, with an official noting a more nuanced answer from Mayorkas at a hearing before the Senate in May of last year.
This is probably why the Democrats decided to skip the hearing. The White House doesn’t want to give Republicans any more ammunition in their effort to impeach Mayorkas — the most hapless DHS secretary in the 20-year history of that department.
White House efforts to hide the crisis at the border are going to meet with some success after Biden took a page from Donald Trump’s border security book and severely limited asylum requests from several countries. Those wanting asylum in the U.S. must now either travel directly from their home country to the U.S. without transiting a third country or ask permission from DHS to cross the border at a designated point.
Recent statistics show that this will cut the number of illegal immigrants nearly in half. Better, but hardly the best we can do. What’s needed are border policies that discourage illegal crossings from all nations. The border is too vast to keep everyone out. But by keeping the number of illegal asylum seekers from crossing under control, the border patrol can concentrate their efforts on interdicting drugs and slowing human trafficking to a trickle.
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