Biden’s Insult at the Border

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 09, 2023

 

President Joe Biden’s allies would have loved to frame his trip to the general vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border in non-partisan terms. The president did not give them that opportunity.

Following a record-breaking surge of migrants arriving at and pouring over the Southern border in 2022, Biden belatedly consented to see the crisis for himself. At least, that’s what many observers expected from the president. What they got instead was a carefully choreographed trip to El Paso, Texas, where Biden toured a Customs and Border Protection parking lot and took a stroll alongside a quiet portion of the border wall.

 

If CNN’s reaction is any indication, the trip failed to achieve its primary purpose: to neutralize the “growing political liability” associated with this White House’s mismanagement of the migrant crisis.

Contrary to the White House’s preview of what the trip would entail, Biden did not see “for himself firsthand” the human tide that has overwhelmed America’s border towns. He came and went “without witnessing the worst of the humanitarian crisis,” CNN concluded. “Nor did the president deliver any remarks, formal or informal, that could serve to advance his immigration position or rebut any of the criticism he has weathered on the issue.”

 

The sense of betrayal in this three-byline dispatch is palpable. Biden not only failed to assuage critics or provide his backers with any useful rejoinder to the charge that this administration has bungled the border crisis. His actions also emphasized his administration’s frivolity on the issue.

 

Biden’s communications team publicized his trip by featuring a photo of Biden touring the U.S.-Mexico border wall alongside a handful of local officials and CBP agents. They also complained about the intractable nature of the problem he faces. “Our problems at the border didn’t arise overnight,” the Biden White House wrote of the “broken system” they’ve inherited. “And they won’t be solved overnight.”

 

The visual backdrop against which Biden made excuses for himself didn’t help his cause. One of the president’s first executive orders was to terminate the national emergency his predecessor declared at the border and to terminate the border wall project. He promised that “no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” which was “a waste of money.” Not only has the administration discovered the wall’s value as a prop, it has since discovered instrumental utility in the check it represents on migrants. The administration has resumed its support for its construction.

 

Likewise, Biden and his administration’s officials reserve unmitigated contempt for the pandemic-era immigration policy deemed Title 42. This White House insisted it wants to allow the policy, which allows border agents to rapidly expel migrants from official ports of entry, to sunset. It is engaged in active litigation in the Supreme Court to ensure that happens. At the same time, however, the administration is touting an aggressive migration management strategy that mimics the migration policies enabled by Title 42 and expands its reach.

 

Biden’s visit to the U.S. border was, more or less, a stopover on his way to a summit of North American elected officials in Mexico. There, Biden will press Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to devote more resources to his country’s war against local drug cartels and the effort to house the 30,000 or so migrants the U.S. expels on a monthly basis. The president’s superficially serious gesture only emphasizes how flippantly the administration handled the issue in its first two years, when it made migration part of Vice President Kamala Harris’s comically unwieldy portfolio.

 

Among the many intractable features of modern life the White House tasked Harris with resolving was the work of identifying and mitigating the “root causes” of the immigration crisis. Highlights from her uninspiring performance in that role include a jaw-droppingly bad interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, in which she defended her own absence from the border by insisting that she’s also never been to Europe, and a sojourn to Central America, where she helped negotiate $3.2 billion in private-sector investments designed to mitigate the conditions “pushing” migrants North.

 

If these theatrics were designed to secure any achievable objective, it was to redirect blame for the debacle at the border away from the president and onto a more expendable figure in Biden’s orbit. Harris has failed to achieve even that.

 

Even the president’s welcome, if perfunctory, attention to the increasingly shambolic Southern border stresses the degree to which this administration treated border security as an irritating afterthought. Biden’s conduct would be insulting if this administration’s distaste for quotidian affairs such as preserving the integrity of the nation’s borders wasn’t so undisguised.