As the COVID-19 pandemic experiences a resurgence in the U.S. due to the contagious delta variant, American citizens are once again set to get the short end of the stick from the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is planning to keep travel restrictions between the U.S. and Europe in place indefinitely, while they ponder removing pandemic-era restrictions on migrants coming from South and Central America. The Biden administration has reinstated mask mandates, and is pondering other restrictions on American citizens, while maskless migrants surge across the U.S. border at a record pace. When Biden assumed office on January 20, at the height of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., he moved almost immediately to reinstate Obama-era “catch and release” policies, which released migrants into the U.S. with no way to track them. At a time when millions of American citizens faced stiff restrictions on their freedom of movement, illegal immigrants were given free reign throughout our country. These are just several of many examples that illustrate Biden and his administration’s shameless hypocrisy when it comes to immigration.
This is why former ICE acting director and Immigration Reform Law Institute senior fellow Tom Homan accused the administration of “ignoring” COVID outbreaks at the border.
“It’s disgusting what they’re doing on COVID,” Homan told Fox News. “ICE has already had 7,500 COVID-positive people through their detention facilities since this pandemic started, and right now they got over 1,000 in custody….1,000 positive covid cases that came across the border.”
These examples are not meant to relitigate the debate over the effectiveness of COVID-19 restrictions, but to point out that since Biden took office, there have been one set of rules for American citizens and another set of rules for illegal immigrants. Millions of Americans are still recovering from the havoc the pandemic wreaked on their lives. When Americans were forced inside their homes throughout 2020 to slow the spread of COVID-19, many turned to drugs. 93,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses, a 31 percent increase from 2019, the largest year to year increase in U.S. history. There is no doubt many of these drugs arrived in the U.S. through the southern border. Additionally, tens of millions of Americans were forced out of work, and a large percentage of small businesses were shuttered forever. Recognizing the unprecedented sacrifices Americans were being forced to take, President Donald Trump vowed to keep America’s borders closed until the pandemic was over.
When Biden took office amidst the pandemic, he could have made clear that the borders would remain closed for the time being. Instead he opened the floodgates. It is unimaginable that the U.S. would set records for illegal migration during a year in which American citizens have faced severe restrictions because of a global pandemic, but that is exactly what is going to happen. Some experts have estimated that roughly two million illegal immigrants will enter the U.S. by the end of 2021. This is as clear an example of a dereliction of duty that we have seen from a president in the modern history of the country. No other country in the world has flung their borders wide-open during the pandemic, but the Biden administration has.
Earlier this year, House Republicans attempted to take Biden’s top health officials to task for the preventable outbreaks happening at the border, but leading health officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky both demurred. But, we know that the border crisis is fueling COVID surges in the U.S. Just in recent weeks, more than 40 U.S. border patrol agents tested positive for the virus, and mass migration has led to outbreaks in American cities, but Biden and his party simply don’t care. When House Republicans attempted to prevent Biden from ending Trump-era border restrictions, Democrats voted it down. Democrats also blocked a GOP bill in Congress, which would require testing for migrants who cross the border.
Hypocrisy in politics is nothing new, but when it comes to the COVID crisis at the southern border, we’ve rarely ever seen anything so shameless.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.