Commentary
There’s an old saying attributed to
Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Three years into his presidency, President Joe Biden has run into the last sentence of that aphorism as he attempts to fool all Americans into believing either that he wants to fix the border crisis or that Republicans are to blame for it.
In his recent State of the Union Address to Congress, President Biden was praised as “
fiery” and “
energetic” by friendly media outlets, but even they had to admit that the speech was more
campaign stump speech than national status report. The right-leaning Federalist
claimed that President Biden lied 30 times. And even Roll Call, which news website and media monitor AllSides calls “
center”-leaning, fact-checked the speech and found that it “included misleading claims on inflation, crime, clean energy investments, wages.”
Roll Call’s list of President Biden’s false or misleading claims missed the biggest one of all: his attempt to blame Republicans in Congress for the disaster at the border that was actually caused by his executive actions.
Even so, what bothered the left was that the president had gone off-script and
called Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan accused of killing college student Laken Riley, an “
illegal.” President Biden
apologized for that faux pas in an interview with MSNBC two days later, saying, “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’ it’s ‘undocumented.’”
But, in fact, Mr. Ibarra, while illegally in the United States, was indeed documented. President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security documented him when it paroled him into the United States “temporarily” and on a “case-by-case” basis, as the law requires, allowing him to enter the country with no criminal background check in his native country. This was despite reports that Mr. Ibarra has tattoos indicating
membership in a violent gang, which should have triggered further investigation.
“I am not going to treat any of these people with disrespect,” President Biden told Jonathan Capehart in the interview. “They built this country.”
Presumably, by “these people,” President Biden meant young men such as the
Ibarra brothers. He would like Americans to ignore the distinction between congressionally authorized immigration (which did indeed help build this country) and the mass, illegal migration of unvetted aliens that he has facilitated during his three years in office.
“We have to control the border ... and more orderly flow,” the president told Mr. Capehart.
By “orderly flow,” President Biden means processing into the country as many inadmissible aliens as physically possible. This has been his policy from the very beginning of his administration, as a
compilation of President Biden’s statements on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, makes clear.
Despite the president’s falsehoods in his speech and protestations to Mr. Capehart, however, a recent CBS
poll shows that 45 percent of Americans thought the “situation at the U.S.–Mexico border is a crisis.” That has the spin doctors working overtime.
Defending President Biden’s border policy on CNN, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
again claimed that “this system has been broken for decades,” that the administration has been trying to fix it from day one, and that there is a magical “bipartisan solution” in Congress that Republicans are refusing to pass.
“Legislation is the enduring solution,” said the man who has deliberately ignored existing legislation for three years. Mr. Mayorkas has refused to return asylum applicants to Mexico, detain or deport illegal aliens as he is legally required to do, and has made up programs to mass parole them into the United States, which the law does not authorize.
Raul Ortiz, head of the 21,000-strong U.S. Border Patrol until the summer of 2023, recently
said he had never once met with President Biden or “border czar” Kamala Harris. Mr. Ortiz said “most definitely” the White House has sent “mixed messages” to would-be illegal migrants.
Not so. The Biden message has been clear and consistent: Enter the United States illegally, and you have a better than even chance of being allowed to stay indefinitely. You’ll even get in ahead of those who try to lawfully navigate the immigration system and wait their turn in line. Cross without identification, and you can give yourself a new name, date of birth, and history that will never be verified.
The world heard President Biden’s message, and they came. They are coming still, from a greater variety of countries, in greater numbers.
Keeping the borders open to please President Biden’s radical base while blaming Republicans in Congress for the results appears to be the White House communications strategy.
“Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends,” President Biden
claimed after a visit to the border at the end of February.
But as Roll Call columnist David Winston
wrote, “Simply saying the same things more aggressively won’t convince voters.”
After three years, President Biden has made his case. He wants billions
more tax dollars to facilitate the “smooth flow” of essentially unlimited immigration by foreigners who have no right to enter the country other than what “rights” he confers through stretching executive powers beyond credibility. President Biden owns the consequences and will have to defend this position, not use the smoke screen he attempted to conjure at the State of the Union to conceal it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
