I am old enough to remember a time when the Left’s mantra was “Trump’s border crisis is manufactured.” As more and more horror stories have made headlines, the mantra shifted to “Trump is right, there is a crisis, but it is one of his making.” Never mind that Congress has stubbornly refused to comply with the administration’s request for $4.5 billion in humanitarian aid that would prevent atrocities such as the one at a Texas detention center overrun with migrant children owing to lack of space. The Left prefers to view every tragedy at the border as another strike against the president.
[Warning: The link in the following paragraph takes you to a page that shows the extremely graphic photo that is described.]
So, yesterday when the Associated Press and other news organizations broke with their long-standing policy and published an horrific photograph of a migrant father and “his 23-month-old daughter laying face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande,” Twitter users added murderer to the many other labels they have pinned on the president. Among those who blamed the president was a man with designs on being president himself:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Trump is responsible for these deaths. https://t.co/UZirFjh3fm
— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) June 26, 2019
But how fair is that considering the crisis at the border has been going on for longer than Trump has been president?
Here is a video from 2014 in which then-President Barack Obama warns against sending young children to cross the border. “Don’t send your children,” he admonishes to Central Americans. “If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. More importantly, they might not make it.”
Indeed, they might not make it.
But if the disastrous situation at the border is not the result of Trump’s mishandling of the crisis, then what is responsible?
One well-articulated answer to that question was provided last night by Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon, who was a guest on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report with Bret Baier.” In the video that follows, he explains that “the driving cause” of tragedies like the one that befell the father and daughter is that “human traffickers and coyotes [the Spanish term referring to the practice of people smuggling across the U.S.] have figured out how to game the U.S. asylum system. The unfortunate reality is until we address the asylum laws, the incentive for these human traffickers and coyotes to convince people who come from awful circumstances to risk their lives for a better life in America is going to continue. The problem lies in Congress, and until Congress addresses it, it going to continue.
The relevant footage begins at 5:01.
