TRUMP, BIDEN HOLD COMPETING BORDER VISITS
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will both mount a visit to the southern border on Thursday.
“On Thursday, President Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas, to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and local leaders,” a White House official told reporters yesterday.
“He will discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement, the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border in decades,” the official added, referencing a legislative deal that to all appearances is effectively dead.
Trump, meanwhile, is slated to be 300 miles away in Eagle Pass, Texas. His campaign took a swipe at President Biden’s simultaneous trip.
“Crooked Joe Biden has had three years to visit the border and fix the crisis he created,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
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“Now Biden’s handlers are sending him there on the same day as President Trump’s publicly reported trip, not because they actually want to solve the problem, but because they know Biden is losing terribly,” Leavitt added, calling it a “last minute, insincere attempt to chase Trump to the border.”
The visit by Biden, whose disapproval rating is more than 55 percent, comes amid an ongoing crisis at the southern border during an election year—a problem that has become voters’ main priority, according to surveys.
Since Oct. 1, 2023, the start of fiscal year 2024, there have been 961,537 encounters on the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. More than 7.25 million border encounters have occurred during the Biden presidency, according to CBP.
This would only be Biden’s second trip to the border; he last visited in January 2023, when he went to El Paso, Texas.
Below we will examine one of the causes of the border crisis, according to a former Panama border official who spoke to The Epoch Times’ Darlene Sanchez in Panama City.
We will then take a look back at Biden’s border policies that have led up to this point.
—Jackson Richman and Joseph Lord
EX-PANAMA BORDER CHIEF BLAMES U.N. FOR CRISIS
The former border security chief of Panama thinks he knows who’s to blame for the crisis at the U.S. southern border: the United Nations and its non-governmental organization offshoots.
Oriel Ortega, who formerly oversaw the Panamanian equivalent of CBP, is now a security and defense consultant to Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo. During a Feb. 22 interview with The Epoch Times, Ortega explained that he saw a jump in migration in 2016—around the same time that more NGOs moved into the country.
That increase corresponded with the U.N.’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration meeting in 2016. Two years later, 152 nations—including Panama—voted in favor of the compact to manage global migration. The United States voted against it.
But under the U.N., the migration process has been anything but orderly, Ortega said.
“It’s completely opposite right now,” he said through an interpreter.
In her book “Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy,” writer Kelly Greenhill suggests that weaker countries are using migration to destabilize their more powerful adversaries.
Joseph Humire, the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told The Epoch Times that he believes that’s what Americans are seeing at the U.S. southern border now.
“This isn’t a conspiracy theory,” he said: the “invasion” at the U.S. southern border is “strategic engineered migration.”
Ortega agreed that the NGOs have “exacerbated” mass migration problems.
“Instead of helping, they’re being part of the problem,” he said. “It’s not the migrants themselves that are creating a national threat; it is the organized crime, and it is these international organizations.”
A record 500,000 illegal migrants traveled through the dense jungle known as the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama in 2023, documents show. Illegal immigrants around the world are flying into South and Central America to start their journey because countries such as Suriname and Ecuador don’t require a visa to enter. Their final destination is the United States.
And when these aliens get across the Darien Gap, they’re met with plenty of aid and assistance from U.N.-linked NGOs, which provide the migrants access to a number of large maps provided by NGOs that display detailed migration routes heading to the United States.
One map is provided by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which shows the migration route from Colombia to Costa Rica, including detailed bus stops, temperatures, altitudes, and “migration kiosk” locations.
Instead of curtailing mass migration, NGOs and the U.N. are facilitating it, Ortega said.
While the U.N. has aided migrants for decades, the scope of its operation has dramatically expanded, with the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States surging.
—Darlene Sanchez and Joseph Lord
BIDEN’S BORDER POLICIES
Biden took office with a commitment to overturn the previous administration’s immigration policies, calling them “cruel and reckless.” He emphasized that his plan would establish a “fair, orderly, and humane” immigration system while implementing smarter measures to secure the border.
But his administration is now grappling with a historic crisis.
Republicans blame Biden for eliminating and reversing policies put in place by the Trump administration.
The illegal immigrant surge has escalated significantly throughout Biden’s presidency, shattering record after record. The past six months of CBP data show it’s only getting worse.
As taxpayer expenses pile up, communities nationwide are feeling the strain. And there seems to be no end in sight.
So how did we get here?
To fulfill campaign promises, Biden has implemented more than 500 actions on immigration in the first three years of his presidency, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
On Jan. 20, 2021, his first day in office, Biden ended Trump’s national emergency declaration on the border, which called for the construction of a border wall.
Biden dismissed the project as “a waste of money.”
He also reversed a ban on travelers from terror-prone countries.
Also on his first day, Biden suspended deportations of illegal aliens for 100 days, though this was challenged by courts.
With another executive order issued on his first day in office, the president strengthened the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or “Dreamers” program for children who were brought into the country illegally.
But many Biden critics say his worst decision was ending “Remain in Mexico,” the Trump-era policy that required illegal aliens to remain in Mexico while their asylum requests were pending; notably, roughly 90 percent of these claims were ultimately denied as unfounded.
These decisions and others made by Biden that transformed the U.S. border are explored in greater detail by The Epoch Times’ Emel Akan and Lawrence Wilson.
—Emel Akan, Lawrence Wilson, and Joseph Lord
SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Social media giants came under scrutiny in two oral arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday. Netchoice, an organization representing social platforms, attempted to sway the justices that regulations in Texas and Florida violated their First Amendment rights.
Nearly four hours of oral argument took place with justices expressing concern about the scope of both the states’ and the social media platforms’ positions.
One of the major points of contention is whether social media companies should be considered “common carriers” and therefore subject to greater regulation. The platforms attempted to argue that their content moderation in itself was an expressive form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
Multiple justices indicated some hesitation towards’ the companies’ “facial challenge” or argument that the laws were unconstitutional in every possible application. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, raised repeated concerns that the Court should be reviewing free speech claims related to more specific actions by social media companies.
Lower courts could receive the cases again if the justices decide to remand or send them back to lower court judges. In doing so, they would presumably remove the preliminary injunction blocking Florida’s law from taking effect.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, an oft-debated liability exemption for social media giants, came up several times during oral arguments. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wondered how the platforms’ claims to free speech didn’t conflict with the exemption it received under federal law.
The Tide Pod Challenge, which entails eating laundry detergent, came up several times during oral arguments as the type of behavior social media giants would seek to address with content moderation. Netchoice argued that forcing social media companies to allow both sides of an issue would lead to content that was pro-suicide, pro-tide pod challenges, pro-terrorism, and other dangerous positions.
Landmark precedents could come from the Texas and Florida laws—potentially setting up parameters for how companies can moderate vast swaths of information flowing through the internet.
Many social media cases are coming before the Court this term, including one next month involving accusations that the Biden administration coerced tech companies to censor content related to COVID-19.
—Sam Dorman
WHAT’S HAPPENING
- Michigan holds its Democrat and Republican primaries.
- President Joe Biden hosts Congressional leaders at the White House to urge them to pass Ukraine and Israel aid, and avert a government shutdown.
- The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will vote again on Julie Su’s nomination to lead the Labor Department.
