Vice President Kamala Harris offered a bizarre response when a reporter at the Jacksonville International Airport asked if she planned to visit surging migrant southern border camps after publicly leaked photographs revealed as many as 690 young children sleeping elbow-to-elbow in pods designed for 80 during the Covid pandemic.
Harris – the Biden administration’s recently designated lead on border policy – first began her reply by cracking up with laughter, then followed with a dodge saying “not today. But I have before and I’m sure I will again.”
Countless personal stories behind those hellhole camp images are even more horrific.
Rafting migrant smugglers grabbed a 6-month-old baby cradled in her mother’s arms and threw the infant into the Rio Grande to distract approaching Border Patrol agents.
After the coyotes then capsized their raft to evade capture - sending panicked migrants flailing in dark nighttime currents - the agents heroically managed to rescue the tiny tot. Very fortunately, no one died.
In another instance, a 9-year-old girl drowned while attempting to wade across that river with her mother and 3-year-old brother before border agents could save her. Although authorities were able to resuscitate the mother and younger child, the girl remained unresponsive, was transferred to emergency medics in Texas, and was later pronounced dead.
A night vision border camera in a remote desert area of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, just west of El Paso, recorded the terrifying scene of a trafficker atop a 14-foot wall dropping two girls, age 3 and 5, to the ground on the U.S. side. Then, after tossing a small bag containing their passports and a cellphone, the two delivery smugglers ran off without waiting to check their condition.
Alert border agents rushed the Ecuadorian sisters to a hospital for medical examinations which fortunately found no serious injuries.
According to the New York Times, 82 migrants are known to have died while attempting to enter the U.S. since October. Countless others have been extorted, raped and variously exploited by Mexican cartels along dangerous and arduous journeys from Central America.
The number of southern border crossing casualties can only be expected to grow in an accelerating out-of-control border rush.
More than 100,000 undocumented immigrants were apprehended last February, a month after the Biden-Harris administration took power. This was the highest total for that month in 12 years. It was also the highest total for any single month since Trump was elected in November 2016.
Unaccompanied children are pathetically vulnerable victims to criminal and natural travel hazards. In February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 9,500 encounters with such youngsters, a 61% increase over January, and the most since the peak of a 2019 crisis. These numbers are expected to grow as weather warms.
And, thanks to an evident Biden administration open border invitation, migrant droves keep pouring in – with more than 8,500 children already in protective custody at facilities run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
An additional 3,500 children typically remain stuck for 3 days or more in cramped holding cells with concrete floors and benches where lights remain on 24 hours a day awaiting transfers to U.S. Customs and Border Protection shelters.
Biden was asked during his March press conference when journalists would have transparent access to witness conditions in border holding facilities “in which children are packed together to really give the American people a chance to see that.” The president answered: "I will commit to transparency, as soon as I am in a position to be able to implement what we're doing right now."
In other words, “we’ll show you later, after we figure out how to quell the stampede of inhumane wreckage our policies causing.”
This is, after all, the same former 2019 presidential candidate Joe Biden who said: "I would in fact make sure that there is immediately a surge to the border. They deserve to be heard. That's who we are. We're a nation that says, 'You want to flee, and you're fleeing oppression, you should come.'"
And while altogether failing to accept blame for the tragic border crisis, the Biden-Harris administration can’t plausibly deny responsibility.
Immediately after taking office, Biden signed an executive order to end Trump's nearly 500 miles of new wall construction; reestablished Obama's "catch-and-release" policy; terminated Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which kept migrants in Mexico as they awaited political asylum hearings; and exempted unaccompanied children from Trump’s Title 42 Coronavirus protection policy which allows Border Patrol agents to turn back migrants caught crossing the border illegally.
During his press conference, the president also said: “Well, look, the idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side. No previous administrations did either, except Trump.”
The president then added: “I’m not going to do it. That’s why I’ve asked the Vice President of United States yesterday to be the lead person on dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in the first place.”
And thus – whether or not she originally played a big hand in putting him up to it – Joe handed the mess he had blamed on Trump to a clearly ungrateful Kamala.
Now, cringe to imagine a Vice President Harris breaking into hysterical cackling fits while explaining to those Central American leaders why they should once again agree to help America reverse the caravans for a crisis her own inanely inept administration both invited and engineered.
But don’t expect it to bode well for American interests when they heartily guffaw back in response.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 10 books, "What Makes Humans Truly Exceptional," (2021) is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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