Biden’s Border Shrug
Is anyone here in charge? President Biden last week tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with leading the White House response to the surge of migrants crossing the southern border. Yet her schedule doesn’t have a single immigrationrelated meeting.
Why is Harris doing so little to solve what she now calls “a huge problem”? White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday “clarified” that the veep is only in charge of diplomacy to address the problem’s “root causes.”
Huh? Did it really take nearly a week to set the record straight, or did the president change his mind?
Maybe Harris decided she didn’t want the job. After all, leaked administration documents show that frontline agencies expect the number of unaccompanied children crossing to soon double (again) to far above record levels.
The feds already have an all-time high of more than 18,000 such minors in custody, with about 5,500 held in temporary facilities not meant to house kids at all.
And it’s going to get much worse. Per documents leaked to The Wall Street Journal and Axios, the administration estimates the number of unaccompanied minors crossing could rise from 16,000 this month to 26,000 in September. That would be more than double the old record of 11,475 in May 2019.
Even the low-end estimates suggest twice as many children will cross this year as in 2019, thought of as a “crisis” year. And these projections don’t include native Mexican kids.
All told, by September, the feds could have more than 53,000 kids in custody. They can’t handle the number they already have, so Team Biden “is planning to begin next week releasing children before sponsors’ background checks have been completed,” the Journal reports.
And, as The Post reported, the administration is forgoing FBI fingerprint checks to vet those caring for children in custody, instead using public-records checks that the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general warned would be less effective at uncovering past sexual or criminal offenses.
Bottom line: Biden & Co.’s only real priority is to do absolutely nothing to secure the border. After that, they’ve got nothing but confusion — including over who’s in charge of the crisis . . . if anyone is.