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Democrats and media outlets may be turning against President Joe Biden over the escalating humanitarian crisis on the southern border. In addition, Mexico is now blaming Biden for the crisis.
In an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” Senate majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Biden isn’t doing enough to address the crisis but also attempted to blame the Trump administration. The comments came as CBS, NPR and other national networks for the first time, began using the term “crisis” in relation to the surge under Biden. As of Monday, those pressing in at the border, including illegal crossings, were up 84 percent over one year ago under Trump.
Unaccompanied minors have increased ten-fold while the administration banning all media from touring the detention facilities. Statistics released this week by US border officials show the surge of children at the US-Mexico border is worse than previously reported — with nearly 30,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the border in a single month under Biden.
Even liberal Politico reports children are”reportedly held for longer than three days on average and being detained in facilities meant for adults. Critics blame Biden’s immigration policies for overwhelming the system and say the president should have more forcefully discouraged people from Central American countries from traveling north.”
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This comes as Fox News aired video showing hundreds of migrants lined up on a riverbank as smugglers ferried them across in rafts after having extorted often up to $3,000 per passenger. Other videos show migrants entering the country wearing different colored wristbands which is apparently an effort by smugglers to determine who has paid and who has not. Witnesses say that those wearing the wrong color are often killed. Even babies have wristbands.
Biden “inherited a huge mess on immigration, and it’s not going to be cleaned up in a month,” Schumer said but the numbers released from Homeland Security and immigration officials reveal otherwise.
Schumer doubled down on his assertions though as his and other Democrats’ finger-pointing has been called out even in liberal news outlets.
“They inherited a big, big mess created by Donald Trump, whose views on immigrants just turned me off.”
Schumer’s comments come as Mexico’s president is laying the blame fully on his American counterpart. He believers Biden is encouraging human trafficking along the border with the United States.
“They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said of Biden the morning after a virtual meeting with his U.S. counterpart on March 1, according to Reuters.
Illegal border crossings hit 100,411 along the southern border in February, according to recently released figures, including nearly 9,500 unaccompanied minors.
According to data from the CBP. Encounters soared to 100,441 in February alone, and this month are expected to set the record since the Bush administration in 2002. Under Trump, agents encountered what was a near-record low of 17,106 illegal immigrants in April 2020.
Biden rescinding a number of immigration orders imposed by Trump, such as one requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims were being adjudicated, has been blamed by critics for the surge this year.
Now, even Biden administration officials are acknowledging that policies may have driven the surge while urging people not to listen to “disinformation” spread by human smugglers.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki asserted to reporters at the White House on Thursday that the border “is not open” as reporters pressed her on the crisis.
Psaki refused to use the term “crisis” saying there was no need to create a new term for what is happening.
The Biden administration kept Title 42, which was imposed under the previous administration and lets officials deny entry to non-citizens because of the danger they may carry a serious disease into the United States. But they have not enforced that law as over 300 migrants with active Covid diagnoses have been released into southern communities, according to news reports.
Many of the Democratic Congressional members are from districts with the highest numbers of Latino residents. They are on the front lines of the growing humanitarian disaster.
“We are weeks, maybe even days, away from a crisis on the southern border. Inaction is simply not an option,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said last week before the newest figures were even released.
On condition of anonymity, a Mexican official told Reuters that Mexico saw a shift in activity by criminal groups “from the day Biden took office.”
The official said the cartels now exhibited “unprecedented” levels of sophistication in their operations, including the use of wristbands and sign-up procedures,
“Migrants have become a commodity,” they added, saying that human smuggling was now as profitable as drug smuggling for local gangs. “But if a packet of drugs is lost in the sea, it’s gone. If migrants are lost, it’s human beings we’re talking about.”
Mexico’s assessments of testimonies and gathered intelligence view Biden’s policies as ones that will “incentivize migration,” Reuters reported.
–Dwight Widaman and wire services
