And yet, as I write this, about 3000 teenagers from our besieged border are talking up residence about a half hour down the road, at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas. The border crisis is now a very local story for me, and your town may be next.
In an arrangement hatched between the federal government and Dallas city officials, an enormous exhibit space at the convention center will be home to a massive population of teenage boys for a period we are told will not exceed 90 days. That’s about all we have been told.
We do not know how these kids got into the country in the first place. We do not know who offered them up for this misadventure. Did parents roll the dice hoping our freshly softened borders would be easier to breach than they were under Donald Trump? Were their journeys financed by payments to smugglers or cartels? We have no idea what the specific plans are for where they will go from here, or with whom. There is plenty of talk of “sponsors” and “family members,” but little definition of how thinly those terms will be stretched in order for this operation to be viewed as a success.
And what does success mean? It depends on whom you ask. Immigration attorneys are all over the local TV news touting the moral necessity of spiriting these kids away from the dangerous, ragged border to live among the skyscrapers of a major American city. Activists are pushing for the next phase, invoking the urgency of making sure these teens find proper homes.
And that’s where the whole scheme becomes clear.
In the latest incarnation of never letting a crisis go to waste, this is a disaster by design. The imagery of teeming populations penned at the border has fueled a narrative for rescuing them via a bus caravan to a better place. But rest assured-- that enormous convention center, viewed as a glorious haven this week, will soon be stigmatized as an unsustainable nightmare, so the pressure can be applied to facilitate emptying its residents out into the custody of a broad community of benefactors, atomized across my state of Texas and heaven knows how many more.
Many will be well-meaning souls from faith-based organizations, eager to help unfortunate youngsters. Others may actually be family members, spirited from whatever time zone they have to drive from to whisk a relative out of Dallas to a home where the floors are not made of concrete.
At every step, the city and the federal government will strut as if they have crafted a Mother Theresa-caliber act of unassailable grace. A fawning media culture is already providing cooperative commentary. “The first question,” posed one local reporter,” is how they will be kept safe.”
An important question, to be sure. But for many, not the first. The up-front question that will not be welcomed as warmly is: How in the world is this even happening? Among those asking is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who delivered a scathing statement in Dallas Wednesday, blaming President Biden’s policies for “enticing unaccompanied minors into inhumane conditions.”
Abbott said Texans and the rest of the nation have a compelling interest in knowing the causes and circumstances of this first wave of migrants—how they got here, the accompanying levels of gang and cartel profiteering, the long-term prospects for their indefinite stays in America. To that end, he seeks to send state law enforcement officials into the convention center to ask questions he feels have been neglected.
As those specifics are investigated, some larger answers take shape. These teenagers are the first phase of an operation that may spread to other American cities, fueled by the breathless plea that border suffering can only be alleviated with springboards into American cities, followed by distribution among countless ill-defined people and places.
As these scattered populations approach adulthood, they can safely await legalization and naturalization, which will be demanded by every Democrat who can find a camera and microphone. The ultimate goal is the reward of decades of grateful Democrat voting.Anyone daring to suggest that this has been a sloppy and improper way to handle migration will be pilloried as a cruel hatemonger. And that’s before we even get to the condemnation that awaits anyone suggesting that it has all been on purpose, with the exact intention of tugging at heartstrings while flooding the interior of America with migrant minors.
This is not just a people-moving operation; it is a “psy op” on a vast scale, a psychological operation designed to wear down any attempt to adhere to normal definitions of asylum or to devise a way to process new arrivals in a careful, manageable fashion.
I have three thousand new neighbors. But they won’t be here long. Soon they will vanish into the landscape of Texas and states beyond. It is impossible to imagine this as the only experiment, because it is hard to imagine who stops the next one, and the next. If the Biden administration finds more willing blue cities eager to participate, look for more convention centers to be prepped, and for the accompanying call for armies of sponsors and family members to follow. This is just the beginning.
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