New York Post

Americans know who's to blame

- Miranda Devine mdevine@nypost.com

OPERATION Gaslight is collapsing. A majority of Americans blame President Biden for the border crisis, a new poll shows, as the administra­tion is caught lying about the makeshift refugee camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

About two-thirds of the 15,000 Haitians living in unsanitary conditions under the bridge have been moved out since Saturday, as local authoritie­s try to regain control.

Just over 5,000 migrants remained Wednesday afternoon.

But the tough talk from the administra­tion that they would be deported back to Haiti under a special Trump-era pandemic health order has turned out to be hot air.

Most of the migrants have been secretly released into the community, according to whistleblo­wers and reporters on the ground, and the administra­tion is determined to hide the truth.

An AP report based on anonymous border sources says Haitians have been freed on a “very, very large scale” in recent days. They are given “notices to appear” at an immigratio­n office within 60 days but if they don’t show up, we know they will simply melt into the shadows.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday 90,000 illegal migrants were deported in August. But officially 208,000 crossed the border last month. So that’s 57 percent who were not sent home but dispersed around the country. Pretty good odds for the chance of the golden ticket of living in America.

The real figures are likely to be much worse, with the Border Patrol estimating that there could be even more “got-aways,” migrants who evade detection to enter the country.

You can therefore conservati­vely double the official number of 1.5 million migrants entering illegally since Joe Biden became president and put out the welcome mat. The taxpayer burden on health and education as well as jobs is incalculab­le.

Instead of fixing the problem or resigning, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just lies.

He thunders on camera that the border is “not open . . . If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed.”

But that’s obviously not true — and no one knows that better than the thousands of illegal migrants who cross the border every day.

They know this is an administra­tion that does not say what it means and does not mean what it says.

Typical of the double-speak and obfuscatio­n was Mayorkas’ farcical appearance before the Senate this week.

Questioned for two days straight, he refused to provide numbers for how many migrants have been secretly dispersed to communitie­s around America.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was suitably annoyed:

“I want numbers,” he told the secretary Tuesday, and accused him of previously providing “factually incorrect informatio­n” to the Senate.

Mayorkas was just as ill-prepared Wednesday when pressed for numbers.

“I work 18 hours a day,” he whined to lawmakers.

The White House did not respond to detailed questions about the numbers of migrants released, where they are sent in America, and how many are tested for COVID-19.

That’s despite Psaki promising to provide the data by day’s end.

The uncontroll­ed immigratio­n surge is a “national security threat,” according to an extraordin­ary letter to Senate leaders from US Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott last week.

“Contrary to the current rhetoric, this is not simply another immigratio­n surge. This is a national security threat,” he wrote.

As if this weren’t bad enough, now Democrats are demonizing Border Patrol agents in Texas who cleverly managed to close the gap across the Rio Grande first by parking agency vehicles as a wall to stop migrants crossing, and then by riding horses into the water to turn people back — which is a standard crowd-control tactic.

But race-obsessed Democrats such as Rep. Maxine Waters of California accused the Border Patrol of being “cowboys with their reins [who] were whipping migrants.”

They were not whipping migrants, Brandon Judd of the border-agents union told Fox News, “They don’t carry whips.”

What observers who know nothing about horse riding failed to understand is that they were looking at split reins, not whips.

But facts don’t matter when you are gaslightin­g the public.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) screeched about the “cruel, the inhumane and flat-out racist treatment” of Haitian migrants.

The Congressio­nal Black Caucus marched into the White House to demand action over “those deplorable photos [of agents] riding horses using their reins to chase down Haitians like they were cattle and goats to be suspended, terminated,” said caucus chair Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio).

Vice President Kamala Harris piled on, slamming the Border Patrol as “horrible.”

“Human beings should never be treated that way,” she said.

She really has cheek. It was her job to get the border under control and she has done nothing except run away from questions and pretend she is working on “root causes” for which she can never be held accountabl­e.

And where’s the president in all this? That Rasmussen Poll Wednesday showed that 54 percent of Americans believe the border crisis is being caused by the polices he put in place.

Biden created this dumpster fire and refuses to front up to reporters and answer to the American people for the humanitari­an catastroph­e he has set in motion.

Is it deliberate or just incompeten­ce? The president’s benign neglect of the crisis suggests that he welcomes unchecked illegal migration.

Surely he is not so clueless he doesn’t know what is happening.

Without a border we have no country, and he seems to like it that way.

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