Six days ago, there were 15,000 mostly Haitian refugees camped under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas. Saturday’s dawn saw nary a trace of them. Where did they all go?
The campsite has been cleared and bulldozed #BorderCrisis pic.twitter.com/oVerehFad8
— Will Carr (@WillCarr) September 24, 2021
Some were sent home on flights back to Haiti. Others returned to Mexico voluntarily — we’re told. But many were also processed and released into the United States, according to numerous reports.
The speed with which the removal happened was remarkable. Rarely has the government moved so swiftly to solve a problem. But the Haitians had become a political embarrassment for Joe Biden — especially after Border Patrol agents on horseback were caught doing their jobs. They weren’t polite in telling people not to rush the border, they didn’t say “please” and “thank you,” and besides, many CBP agents are white and the Haitians are black.
So of course, this gave the racialists an opening that they promptly exploited.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described the scenes as “a stain on our country.”
“It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants,” she wrote on Twitter. “Immigration should not be a crime.”
Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz, who addressed reporters in Del Rio alongside Mayorkas, said he made the decision to deploy the horse patrol agents to “find out if we had any individuals in distress, and be able to provide information and intelligence as to what the smuggling organizations were doing in and around the river.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said at a White House briefing that the images of the border patrol trying to keep order in a chaotic situation “do not reflect who we are” as a nation.
“In the midst of meeting these challenges, we — our entire nation — saw horrifying images that do not reflect who we are, who we aspire to be, or the integrity and values of our truly heroic personnel in the Department of Homeland Security,” Mayorkas said Friday.
He added: “The investigation into what occurred has not yet concluded. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism.”
The fact that Mayorkas and his boss left the Border Patrol agents hanging out to dry tells us all we — and the CPB agents — need to know about the leadership these men and women are working under.
Making CPB agents the villains in this little melodrama and throwing them under the bus to assuage the likes of AOC and other racialists is what we should expect in the future from this president and his people.
The good news is that 20,000 more Haitians are working their way across Mexico right now, hoping to make it into the U.S.
As President Joe Biden scrambles to deal with 14,000 Haitian migrants who appeared in South Texas seemingly overnight, a bigger challenge may be yet to come. Thousands more Haitians are already on their way via one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, risking their lives to pass through 66 miles of lawless jungle en route to the U.S.
More than 20,000 Haitians are trekking upward through Central America based on numbers from the Panamanian government, which tracks migrants crossing the Darien Gap. The sliver of land connecting Colombia and Panama is a transit point for migrants heading north and also one of the most deadly, marked by drug traffickers, armed guerrillas, and jaguars.
This is a problem for Biden that is only going to get worse — much worse.
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