RIO DROWN HORROR
A tragic video appears to show young migrants drowning in the Rio Grande, a deadly turn in the escalating border crisis.
The footage, captured by fisherman Jesus Vargas, shows three people in the water near the border town of Laredo, Texas, with only their heads bobbing above the surface.
“You don’t have life jackets, nothing? They’re drowning, these guys!” Vargas is heard shouting at US Border Patrol agents standing on the shoreline nearby.
“That girl didn’t come out no more!” Vargas yells of one apparent victim.
He used his fishing reel to save one boy, about 13 years old, but he claims a woman and two teenage boys drowned. Border Patrol said only two people died. The incident took place after agents “foiled a human smuggling attempt,” the agency’s Laredo sector posted on Facebook.
The post said that agents saw several people attempt to swim across the river into Mexico and that some were taken into custody while others safely made it to the Mexican riverbank.
“Two individuals succumbed to the dangerous currents of the Rio Grande river and perished,” the statement said.
Video that Vargas shot appears to show Mexican authorities recovering a body on the opposite side of the river.
The Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the incident, the agency said. The Border Patrol did not respond to requests for further comment from The Post.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, said it had no other information available.
The drownings occurred on Tuesday, and after the video he posted to Facebook went viral, Vargas told a local TV station that he had been getting calls from Guatemala and other Central American countries asking about the woman.
Vargas said the number of people he sees trying to cross the border has increased dramatically. He said he tells migrants, “Don’t cross the river.”
A surge in migrants that started at the end of last year has steadily increased since President Biden took office.
“I think we’ll see an increase for a while,” Sergio Cordova, of the migrant relief group Team Brownsville, told the Sunday Times of London.
Cordova, who worked for months in a tent city for refugees in Matamoros, just inside the Mexican border, said residents there staged an impromptu parade in November when news of Biden’s victory arrived.
“They knew of the promises Biden made during his campaign,” Cordova said. “It’s empty there now, because everyone has crossed over.”
Separately, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who visited a Homeland Security detention center for unaccompanied children with Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Friday, told NPR that conditions there were unacceptable.
“These are facilities you wouldn’t want your kids in for 10 minutes,” he said. “They are big open rooms. The kids are sleeping in thin mattresses on the floor, bunched six inches to a foot away” from one another.
The law requires that children be moved out from such facilities within 72 hours, but the increased numbers are stretching that time to as much as 10 days.
“We’ve got to ultimately do better,” Murphy said. “These are conditions that can just build on the trauma that these kids have already experienced in their home countries and on the long transit to the United States.”
The DHS has granted an $89 million contract to San Antonio-based social-services agency Endeavors to provide hotel rooms for about 1,200 migrant family members. The contract, first reported by Axios, is for six months but may be extended or expanded.
Endeavors CEO Jon Allman confirmed the contract, which he said was a continuation of services the organization has provided to the migrant population since 2012.
A March 9 post on the Endeavors Web site celebrated its new federally funded “Migrant Wellness program” that will provide mental-health evaluation, group and individual therapy and “victim educational classes” to families and children.
AS metaphors go, it will be hard to top President Biden falling up the steps of Air Force One. He went down not once, not twice, but three times before scrambling to his feet.
That was bad enough, but a silly White House excuse made it worse. Wind gusts knocked him over, an aide claimed, apparently with a straight face.
The one hopeful sign is that nobody blamed Donald Trump. If that thinking is contagious, there might be hope for the new president after all. Otherwise, there are reasons to fear America is headed off the rails and into the weeds.
Up to now, the theme of the Biden administration has been that whatever Trump did, they will do the opposite. The approach worked wonders during the campaign, but “opposite day” is a child’s game, not a sensible governing principle for the world’s superpower.
Yet the hate-Trump mantra is demanded by the peanut gallery of anti-American leftists and their media handmaidens setting the Biden agenda.
The result is blunder after blunder, at home and abroad. The most obvious example is the reckless rhetoric and idiotic policies stoking the migrant surge on our southern border. Similarly, the stunned gibberish from Biden aides after Chinese diplomats lectured and humiliated them last week is a sign of global trouble to come.
Connecting the dots of these and other mistakes suggests Biden took office while suffering from two major illusions. The first was that everything Trump did was a failure.
You could believe that only if you got all your ideas from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC. The Dems never recognized Trump’s legitimacy and the never-Trump media twisted the news instead of reporting it, creating a dishonest narrative of events. When Trump succeeded, they called it failure.
These distortions shaped Democratic talking points, and Biden, apparently lacking any ideas of his own, simply parroted them. Now that he’s trying to turn those talking points into policies, he’s the one creating actual disasters.
Biden’s second illusion grows out of the first and holds that America and the world were clamoring for four more years of the Obama-Biden administration.
It’s hardly surprising that a stumbling 78-year-old man with declining faculties was susceptible to nostalgia for a grand past. Problem is, the past wasn’t so grand. Or popular.
A trip down memory lane would have reminded him that Dems up and down the food chain were demolished during the Obama years, and stood at their lowest ebb in a century after the wipeout of the 2016 election.
But because Biden didn’t know or doesn’t remember why Trump was elected, he’s put in charge of important agencies veterans of those earlier failures, and they, too, apparently learned nothing.
Dems shrink from the charge that they favor open borders, but how else to describe what they’ve done?
They turned success into failure because Trump, over their unpatriotic resistance, had solved the caravan problem with a patchwork of programs. Building the wall, deportations of criminal aliens and agreements that kept asylum seekers in Mexico reduced incentives for Central Americans to make the long trek north.
One by one, Biden demolished those bulwarks. First came the promise that America would have a more humane policy once Trump was gone and a 100-day ban on deportations, including criminals.
Once in office, he stopped wall construction and ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum cases, a combination that sent an unmistakable invitation to families and the ruthless coyotes who charge thousands of dollars to guide them to the border. Some in law enforcement call Biden the best friend the coyotes, sex traffickers and drug cartels ever had.
Even Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said many waiting in Central America view Biden as “the migrant president” because his policies welcomed them. That puts an extra burden on Mexico as the caravans cross its southern border and move north.
In response, Biden aides are playing word games by refusing to admit they created a crisis — while trying to hide the evidence. They slapped a gag order on border agents and blocked the media from photographing the bulging crowds of children and teens in what are described as “jail-like” facilities.
By comparison, Trump was transparent and available to the press to answer questions on all his policies. Biden also hides himself from the press.
The result is that while illegal immigration significantly declined under Trump, it is now rising dramatically. Tens of thousands already have come into the country under Biden, with taxpayers footing the bill for food, hotels and medical care. Many adult crossers tested positive for the coronavirus — yet were released into America.
Another result of Biden’s illusions is the China problem, and it too is on full display. The humiliating treatment of Secretary of State Tony Blinken by Chinese officials last week should wake the president’s team to the peril of trying to return to “normal” relations with the Asian giant, as if the rocky relations with China were all Trump’s fault.
In fact, Trump correctly read China’s ambitions for global dominance and the absolute necessity to push back on trade, military, cyber and human rights abuses across the region, including with Uighurs and Hong Kong. China didn’t like the pushback and openly supported Biden’s election.
Yet if Biden foolishly believed that meant there was common ground between him and President Xi Jinping, Thursday’s tongue-lashing should have been an eye-opener.
The withering assault, including the Communists’ claim that BLM protests and riots prove America’s weakness, demonstrated that China is no longer pretending to be a developing nation. It is now a confident adversary, one that must be confronted without gauzy illusions.
Thus, it is doubly worrisome that Friday, without mentioning the nasty meeting, Biden lapsed into fond memories of his time with President Xi — years ago.
His babbling disconnect underscores the doubts of whether Biden is mentally and physically capable of protecting America against a China determined to expand its global footprint.