Feds Sneakily Bus Migrant Children in the Dark of Night Into Texas Town
During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised, in empurpled language, to do what amounted to a complete reset on former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants,” Biden’s campaign immigration plan read. “It’s wrong, and it stops when Joe Biden is elected president.”
The plan didn’t necessarily make specific policies clear, but you could make some guesses.
The campaign said Biden would “[r]eassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees” and “do better to uphold our laws humanely and preserve the dignity of immigrant families, refugees, and asylum-seekers.”
Biden promised it would be a “Day 1” priority to reverse a Trump administration policy that requires individuals who claimed asylum at the border to wait in Mexico while their cases were adjudicated, according to The Washington Post.
Anyone familiar with the basic precepts of immigration cause-and-effect would realize this would mean the moment Biden was declared the winner of the election, caravans would gather and our southern border would become a much busier place.
Depending on your estimation of Joseph Robinette Biden, you either assumed or hoped against your better judgment he had a plan to handle this.
The first sign the assumers were wrong and the better judgment of the hope crowd ought to have prevailed came in the weeks after the election, when Biden officials practically begged migrants not to come immediately. Biden himself said he wanted immigration “guardrails” before he reversed Trump policies to protect against the possibility of “2 million people on our border.”
This statement was uttered on Dec. 23. That immigration plan I quoted was initially released in December 2019, according to CNBC.
Given a year to formulate how to deal with the fallout his rhetoric and promises would cause, Biden announced two days before Christmas and less than a month before the inauguration he was exploring migration “guardrails” to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the midst of a pandemic.
The same establishment media that was fond of calling any policy the outgoing president put forth as slapdash ignored the alarming implications behind these words and when they were being uttered; in the enervated environment of 2020 Washington, Biden’s tacit admission the fallout to this hadn’t really been thought through should have induced an involuntary facial reaction among journalists not dissimilar to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Anyhow, fast-forward a little less than three months and Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services is now busing migrant children into the west Texas city of Midland under the cover of night to relieve overcrowding conditions. Midland city officials said nobody bothered informing them of the decision.
“City of Midland and Midland County officials say they were completely blindsided by the opening of the facility. At a press conference on Monday, Midland Mayor Patrick Payton said that the facility is ‘disrespectful’ to the City of Midland,” KOSA-TV reported.
“It is utter chaos and I don’t think I’m exaggerating on this but they are coming over by the thousands, literally by the thousands,” Payton said.
This is a horrible situation, given the boys at the facility range in age from 13 to 17. That’s why this writer feels horrible finding grim humor in the answer both Payton and a Midland County judge got when they reached out to federal agencies regarding details about the detention facility: “We will circle to you.”
Either White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s phraseology has really caught on or the Biden administration has centered its messaging while stalling around the irrational belief this is a great rhetorical dodge.
The folks in Midland weren’t the only people struck by surprise when these minors were bused in under cover of darkness.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, said he only found this out on Saturday night.
“We got surprise news from the federal HHS that they’re going to be sending some of these migrants to a holding facility in Midland,” Abbott said, adding he didn’t have answers to questions about what the detention facility would look like.
“How many people are they bringing in here? Where are those people going? Where are they going after that? What type of COVID protocols are they using? What are they going to do to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 concerning all the people they are bringing into the state of Texas?” Abbott told host Maria Bartiromo.
“Maria, there are so many questions that are completely unanswered by the Biden administration and the danger that they are putting onto the backs of our fellow Texans.”
According to KWES-TV, the underage migrants are being held at the Cotton Logistics Midland Mancamp. Cotton Logistics, which operates seven “mancamps,” describes its facilities on its website as “temporary workforce housing.”
“From disaster relief catering to long-term ‘man camp’ style housing to construction of a new maintenance facility, you can count on Cotton Logistics to deliver cost-effective solutions that will help you meet your operational goals,” the website reads.
Far be it from me to cast aspersions on how well Cotton Logistics does this kind of work, but I’m not under the impression this is what immigration activists pictured when they saw Biden dismantling Trump’s immigration policies.
In fact, it sounds similar to the situation when the Biden administration reopened the Carrizo Springs detention facility in Texas last month due to the influx in unaccompanied minors, something that enraged activists because it bore a striking similarity to Trump’s “kids in cages” detention policies:
These are pictures from the Carrizo Springs facility. Yes, it was widely considered one of the best of the existing detention facilities. But it’s still a jail at the end of the day, & keeping children there for any extended period is a crime. Things don’t have to be like this. https://t.co/lggYYGkGt4 pic.twitter.com/qnuP2CoLTq
— Sturgeon’s Law (@Sturgeons_Law) February 23, 2021
If you’re an immigration activist and this is something that gets your blood pressure up, I’d suggest a beta blocker for at least the next few months. That’s because, according to a Sunday report by The New York Times, things are bad enough that the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which usually aids in recovery from natural disasters — is being used by the Biden administration to provide “food, water and basic medical care” to young migrants, according to a spokesman for the agency.
“Roughly 4,000 youths were in Customs and Border Protection facilities this week, more than the roughly 2,600 children and teenagers held in such detention facilities in June 2019. Troy Miller, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said last week that 9,457 children, including teenagers, were detained at the border without a parent in February, up from more than 5,800 in January,” the report said.
“The Biden administration has so far failed to quickly process the young migrants and transfer them to shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, where they are held until the government matches them with a sponsor. The administration has struggled to expand the capacity of those shelters, where roughly 8,500 migrants were held this week. The Biden administration recently directed the shelters intended to hold the children to return to normal capacity, despite the coronavirus pandemic.”
In a statement to Breitbart, HHS said the facility in Midland “will provide a safer and less over-crowded environment where children are cared for and processed as quickly as possible and either released to a sponsor or transferred to an [Office of Refugee Resettlement] shelter for longer-term care. The Emergency Intake Site is intended for use as a temporary measure.”
It added that a “COVID-19 health screening protocol for all children will be implemented to follow CDC guidelines for preventing and controlling communicable diseases.”
Midland likely won’t be the last such site for migrant minors, however. Breitbart reported that “HHS officials are also reportedly eyeing locations in Dallas that could include the Dallas Convention Center.” The Associated Press reported up to 3,000 migrant children and teenagers could be housed there.
This was all entirely foreseeable. It was rhetoric and policy that produced a cause and effect. It’s as if the Biden administration threw a kegger while their folks were away and is absolutely stunned there are red Solo cups everywhere, the living room windows are broken and who knows what that smell coming off the couch is.
The problem is the metaphorical kegger is immigration policy, a keystone of Biden’s agenda. The red Solo cups everywhere, meanwhile, are the minors and teenagers encouraged by Biden’s rhetoric to make a perilous journey and who are now caught in a humanitarian crisis.
The collateral damage was inevitable — and the fallout is reprehensible. The administration’s cluelessness regarding how bad this would get — whether real or feigned — is nothing short of shameful.
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