San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Roy’s theatrics over border policy are selective
Chip Roy earned his Thursday night guest spot on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
The Texas Republican, whose district includes part of San Antonio, put on quite a show that day, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
A red-faced Roy shouted at Mayorkas, talked over him and theatrically tossed photos of fentanyl victims to the floor, in the general direction of the homeland secretary.
“The only plan that you offer,” Roy said with regard to Mayorkas’ border policy, “is to process aliens faster and encourage more to come.”
Roy’s rage was genuine. At the same time, it was a practiced and calculated ploy to get border hawks — including Carlson — all fired up.
An April 21 piece in the New York Times revealed that
House Republicans had drafted a 60-page memo in preparation for Mayorkas’ appearance.
The document was meant to coach GOP committee members on the proper use of “misleading and provocative talking points that seek to portray migrants and refugees as perpetrators of gruesome crimes.”
Roy marinated in his outrage and worked it from all angles. One moment, he was suggesting that our borders are wideopen invitations to fentanyl smuggling, human trafficking, sexual assault and the destruction of ranchers’ property.
The next moment, he bemoaned the deaths of migrants who lost their lives trying to cross the border.
Roy is angry that President Joe Biden is preparing to lift Title 42, a public health order that has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to limit border crossings.
Surely, Roy understands that the use of Title 42 is causing asylum seekers to make repeated efforts to cross the border when they get rebuffed. It ultimately induces some to make extreme, dangerous treks, such as the ones that produced the casualties he is now lamenting.
Also, Roy has spent most of the past two years downplaying COVID’s public health risks and urging everyone to get back to a normal, pre-pandemic life. How then does he justify the continued use of a public health order to suspend a refugee’s legal right to apply for asylum?
During his three years in Congress, Roy has delivered a lot of rhetorical fireworks, but has shown neither a grasp for context nor a willingness to probe for the root causes of problems.
For example, Roy relentlessly blames the Biden administration for fentanyl overdose deaths in this country, on the grounds that much of the powerful synthetic opioid’s supply is coming from Mexico.
He showed no similar inclination, however, to hold his fellow Republican, former President Donald Trump, accountable for the fact that in 2020, Trump’s final year in office, drug overdose deaths in this country skyrocketed to a single-year high of 93,000.
I don’t remember Roy shouting at Trump administration officials while showing them photos of opioid casualties.
The bigger point is that fentanyl smuggling is successful only because Big Pharma created a demand by hooking millions of Americans on dangerous opioids such as OxyContin.
When addicts could no longer get prescriptions or insurance coverage for those drugs, they turned to buying fentanyl from drug dealers.
Roy might want to throw some photos in the direction of U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who took in nearly $800,000 from Big Pharma and then crafted a 2016 law that stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its power to freeze suspicious opioid shipments.
Then there’s the issue of how the U.S. processes migrants at the border. Roy bashed Mayorkas for the use of what Republicans refer to as a “catch and release” policy.
It means that migrants are processed at the border and then released until they have to go before an immigration court.
It’s a policy that Trump railed against, but used again and again.
An April 2019 Associated Press story reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with Trump as president, “set free more than 125,000 people” who came into
the United States over the previous 3 ½ months.
“In recent months, the number of families crossing into the U.S. has climbed to record highs, pushing the system to the breaking point,” the story said. “As a result, the government is releasing families faster, in greater numbers and at points farther removed from the border.”
The one valid point Roy offered on Thursday came when he questioned Mayorkas on whether the U.S. has “operational control” of the border. The homeland secretary unconvincingly answered, “We do.”
The truth is that this country hasn’t had consistent operational control of the border in decades. But Roy only gets mad at Democrats about it.