[SPECIAL JANUARY PROMOTION: Spend $50+ In The FPM Store And Receive A Free Copy Of “Final Battle” By David Horowitz.]
The Biden administration is begging the Mexican government for help in stemming the tidal waves of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States from Mexico that President Biden set in motion from the first day he took office. Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to ask for help. They came away with vague language of support but no concrete commitments.
López Obrador showed his hand at a press conference that he held on January 5th. Mexico’s willingness to assist is conditional upon the U.S.’s submission to a set of outrageous demands.
The first demand is an extortionate price tag of $20 billion to go to Latin American and Caribbean countries. This is more than eight times what the Biden Administration requested in foreign assistance for Latin America and the Caribbean in Fiscal Year 2023. No more U.S. taxpayer money should go to any country, including Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central American countries, until they take strong and sustained action to stop the caravans of migrants moving through their territories.
The second demand is for the United States to change its foreign policy to suit Mexico’s desire to coddle two socialist countries that have among the world’s worst human rights records and are adversaries of the United States. López Obrador insists that the U.S. suspend its boycott of Cuba and remove all sanctions against Venezuela. This represents a direct challenge to the U.S.’s sovereign right to control its own foreign policy. The answer to López Obrador should be to mind his own business.
The third demand amounts to amnesty for at least ten million Hispanic migrants who have worked in the United States for more than ten years by giving them visas to remain in the country. López Obrador has the audacity to tell the United States which illegal immigrants it should allow to stay in the U.S., with visas in hand.
A senior Biden administration official would only say that President López Obrador “has a very ambitious agenda. For some of these things, we would need Congress to act. We share the vision that we need to lift up the region.”
The sad fact is that President Biden shares much of President López Obrador’s ambitious open border agenda. In fact, on his first day in office Biden proposed legislation that went even further than President López Obrador’s demand. His bill would immediately provide “temporary legal status” to virtually all immigrants in the country illegally as of January 1, 2021, with the opportunity for them to obtain a green card and ultimately become naturalized U.S. citizens.
López Obrador could care less about the havoc visited upon Americans resulting from his own failure to effectively combat the Mexican cartel criminals who regularly smuggle drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. An open U.S.-Mexico border serves Mexico’s national interests by reducing the strain on Mexico’s social service resources and making the immigration mess faced by Mexico within its borders largely America’s problem.
But President Biden is supposed to be looking out for America’s interests, not Mexico’s. He has failed to fulfill this fundamental responsibility of his office as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief.
The Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy is an egregious example. According to a post by a Fox News reporter based on his border agent sources, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to border patrol agents in Eagle Pass, Texas during a meeting with them on January 8th that “the current release rate for migrants caught crossing the border illegally is ‘above 85%.’”
The Biden administration’s mass release of illegal immigrants into the interior of the United States under its catch-and-release policy, which attracts millions more immigrants to enter the country illegally, does not comply with federal immigration law. Biden’s failure to abide by and enforce U.S. immigration laws is a dereliction of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Moreover, President Biden has ignored the U.S. government’s responsibilities to the states set forth in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which states: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”
The Biden administration has turned its back on Texas’s numerous requests to protect Texans by securing the border from invasion by tidal waves of illegal immigrants, some of whom have committed domestic violence on Texas land. To make matters worse, the Biden administration tries to stymie every initiative that Texas takes on its own, such as construction of barriers, to counter this invasion precipitated by the administration’s open border and catch-and-release policies.
Indeed, President Biden has joined López Obrador in opposing Texas’s new law that would allow Texas state law enforcement officials to prosecute migrants entering the United States from Mexico illegally.
Mexico’s president has vowed to fight the law that Texas enacted to protect Texans. No surprise there. Unlike President Biden, López Obrador puts his own country’s interests first.
“The foreign ministry is already working on the process to challenge this law,” López Obrador said last December. Whatever case the Mexican government decides to file against Texas should be summarily thrown out of court. Mexico has no standing to challenge a law duly enacted by a sovereign U.S. state that applies only to individuals caught within that state after having entered the U.S. illegally.
But Mexico’s president should not worry since President Biden is on his side, rather than on the side of Americans who demand that U.S. immigration laws be fully enforced.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters last December that the law “will not, and does not, make the communities in Texas safer.” “It just doesn’t,” Jean-Pierre added.
It is the Biden administration that has made the communities in Texas and all across the country far less safe because of its open border and catch-and-release policies. Nevertheless, the Biden administration is suing Texas for allegedly interfering with the federal government’s exclusive authority to enact and execute America’s immigration laws while the administration itself has endangered Texans by failing to properly execute those laws.
America needs a changing of the guard at the White House to fully secure the border. This means ending catch-and-release, reinstituting Remain in Mexico, immediately removing illegal immigrants with questionable asylum claims when they are first apprehended, and deploying as many border agents as needed to do their real job of guarding the border.