The Washington Examiner, citing reports from the Center Square, has a piece up today detailing that 20 states — including some very blue states like Oregon — have deployed military troops to the Southern border since Joe Biden took office.
The Defense Department requested 2,500 National Guard members from states earlier this summer to help federal law enforcement with detecting human and drug smuggling operations. Both Democratic- and Republican-governed states have signed on to the border security mission.
To date, states sending troops include Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, and South Carolina, according to the Center Square.
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In addition, the U.S. Virgin Islands and seven states — Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington — agreed to send aviation support.
Despite the progressive-friendly media’s attempts to cancel use of the word “invasion” when covering the border crisis, the policy response from DoD looks an awful lot like they think it might be time to treat “the surge” (one of the preferred media euphemisms) as one. This is especially true when considering the use of air cover from reliably blue states. From The Examiner:
The Oregon Army National Guard agreed to send UH-72A Lakotas and helicopter crews to work with the U.S. Border Patrol, which is responsible for arresting noncitizens who attempt to enter the country illegally.
“The mission will not be easy,” Chief Warrant Officer Dave Long told the East Oregonian. “We will fly each night. Our mission is to stop fentanyl, meth, and other illicit drugs from crossing the border and, additionally, to stop human trafficking and provide humanitarian aid to those in need. But my priority will be to use all of my skills and experience to bring everyone home on this deployment.”
Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, wrote in August that Biden owns the crisis because, through policy and a general dismantling of Trump’s border response, he effectively threw wide the border doors. Complicating matters, illegal crossers have a reasonable suspicion they can stay if they make it, and there will be few consequences.
[T]he Biden administration has cut down on prosecuting illegal immigrants by nearly 80 percent. This all but invites more to come. Under Biden’s watch, over 800,000 illegal immigrants have now come into the United States unapprehended — the “got-aways.” We simply don’t know what criminal types were among them — we do know that just since October, there were 56 people on the terror watchlist among the ones we did apprehend. Biden’s callous disregard for public safety is beyond worrisome.
And things have gotten wildly out of hand, not just because of a surge of new, unprocessed immigrants, but because the murderous Mexican cartels have been enriched in income by a staggering 2,500 percent over the last four years. They’ve made $13 BILLION in revenue in 2022 so far.
Reports began trickling out very recently that Biden was working on completing parts of Trump’s border wall. As The Economist put it: “The Southern border is a political problem for Democrats because it is an actual problem.”
Well said. But it’s also a problem for Americans in general because fentanyl deaths are soaring, immigrants are being shuttled into the interior to parts unknown, and border states are at their breaking points. It’s nothing if not a tragedy that the humanitarian crisis wasn’t enough to get Team Biden to actually start addressing the “political” problem at the border. But how’s this for politics?: Biden’s open border policy and non-response to the growing crisis is also a massive failure of leadership and should be a reason Biden is allowed only a single term in the White House.