Democrats are doing everything they can to convince the American public that things are just fine when it comes to immigration, but at least a couple of former top Obama administration officials say that’s a load of hogwash. They’ve come out in the past week to express concern over what the Border Patrol is facing on a daily basis, and both of them have encouraged Congress to do something about it before things spiral completely out of control.
“By anyone’s definition, by any measure, right now we have a crisis at our southern border,” former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Saturday. “There were 4,000 apprehensions in one day alone this past week, and we’re on pace for 100,000 apprehensions on our southern border this month. That is by far a greater number than anything I saw on my watch in my three years as secretary of Homeland Security.”
Johnson said that while he agrees with the Trump administration that something must be done, he does not agree that the president should take unilateral action.
“There are ways to do this, and you make your case to Congress for why there is a crisis and there is a crisis on our southern border right now and you do it through a conventional reprogramming and you get the resources you need to address the crisis,” he said. “There are answers to this problem, and if we can strip away the politics and the emotion, they can be obtained.”
Unfortunately, this kind of talk is nearly as sort-sighted as saying there isn’t a crisis at all. Trump has tried for more than two years to talk immigration sense to the bozos on Capitol Hill; they don’t want to hear it. The best Nancy Pelosi can do is insist that it’s an imaginary crisis to distract the American people from the Russia investigation. Although, at this stage in the game, we would think that Democrats would be more interested in distracting the public from “Russia” than Trump. In any event, Democrats have shown no interest whatsoever in solving this problem, which they argue doesn’t actually exist.
Johnson is not the sole Obama-era official telling it like it is, though. Mark Morgan, who was the Customs and Border Patrol chief under the former president, said in an op-ed last week that “historical analysis clearly shows that we are experiencing a crisis greater than we have in recent times.”
“The entire immigration system is overrun,” he wrote. “They’re not at the breaking point, they’re past it. Border Patrol resources are being pulled off the front lines to address the unprecedented humanitarian crisis while the cartels further exploit our open borders, increasing the threat to our country.”
It’s fine, the Democrats say. Just fine.
And to them, and their goals for this country, that’s probably true.
