In a staged bit of activist theater, immigration radicals hung up on a virtual meeting with aides to Joe Biden, protesting the continuation of policies initiated by Donald Trump to deal with the wave of illegal immigrants at the border in 2019.
Specifically, the radicals were protesting the restart of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forced asylum seekers to wait for their U.S. court dates in Mexico. The Supreme Court had ordered the Biden administration to restart the program after a lawsuit by Missouri and Texas.
The staging of the protest was a typical radical theatrical production. Naturally, they portrayed themselves as the heroes and the Biden administration as the villains. The poor, helpless illegal immigrants were the damsels in distress.
It’s why no one takes them seriously.
Advocates asked for time before the beginning of a video meeting Saturday morning with several Biden administration officials, including people from the Department of Homeland Security officials and the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Esther Olavarria. The activists read a statement accusing the administration of “playing politics with human lives” and said they could no longer “come into these conversations in good conscience.”
“We have sadly reached a turning point,” they said, then most of the advocates exited the video call.
The activists know that the Biden administration had no choice in restarting the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, but how can they make a big PR splash in the media unless they’re “speaking truth to power”?
“I think they’re afraid of the backlash of anti-immigrant groups, and we’ll continue to remind them that that backlash will exist regardless of what they do,” said Luis Guerra, the 32-year-old strategic capacity officer at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network who walked out of the meeting Saturday. “We don’t actually believe they’re doing everything in their power to actually restore asylum at the border, the way that they say that they’re trying to.”
There’s a very good reason that asylum at the border isn’t being restored. In case the lunatics hadn’t noticed, there’s a pandemic still going on. Besides that, there is literally no place to put them. Facilities at the border were never designed to process tens of thousands of refugees every month and the Biden administration would have a humanitarian catastrophe on its hands if they opened the border.
Activist anger at the administration is especially acute because they now feel like both Democrats and Republicans are embracing a nativist approach to immigration and they have nowhere to turn.
“It’s almost like we were bamboozled into thinking that this was going to be the best option, and it isn’t. It’s actually worse,” said Saludares. “It is as if you know that your family is now turning against you and telling you that it’s okay. It’s not.”
The truth is, the radicals bamboozled themselves. They saw what wasn’t there with Joe Biden. The president does not agree with their radical, open-border policies. What sane person would?
The radicals can advocate for these loony policies because the ensuing catastrophe wouldn’t be their responsibility. You can’t tell them that because they’re so full of righteous outrage that they are blinded by their own supposed moral superiority.
Joe Biden is not going to commit political suicide for the open-border radicals. They’d better get used to that fact.
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