On Thursday evening, during a truly raucous rally in Grand Rapids, Donald Trump doubled and tripled down on his border threats.
Specifically, he claimed that more caravans are forming and that the Mexican government isn’t doing enough to stop them.
That, in turn, means he may have to “close the damn border”.
His remarks came just days after US border authorities told ABC that the number of undocumented migrants stopped at America’s southern border may hit 1 million by the end of 2019, double last year’s level.
“The estimate, which includes illegal crossings and people arriving at ports of entry, comes as administration officials say they have limited options when it comes to deterring families traveling with children”, ABC wrote Wednesday, adding that “the influx has gotten so bad at places like El Paso, Texas, that the central processing center there was 395% over capacity last weekend, forcing officials to process people beneath a street overpass.”
“The numbers are trending from bad to worse, which is why we need Congress to act to fix outdated laws to address migrant flows,” Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted earlier this week.
Here’s what Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan had to say to reporters during a press conference on Wednesday:
Two weeks ago, I briefed the media and testified in Congress that our immigration system was at the breaking point. That breaking point has arrived this week at our border. CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest Border and nowhere has that crisis manifested more acutely than here in El Paso.
He continued:
For the first time in over a decade, CBP is performing direct releases of migrants when [ICE] is unable to provide bed space to relieve overcrowding. We are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy in a CBP facility. But with these numbers, with the types of illnesses we’re seeing at the border, I fear that it’s just a matter of time.
McAleenan went on to say that immigrant families are suffering from chicken pox, lice, fevers, seizures and heart problems. Somehow, that’s all the fault of existing immigration policies. Here, we’ll let him explain it to you:
We have dedicated over 100,000 hours of border agent and officer time on medical transport and watch. Those are agents that are not on the border protecting communities, but are involved in the medical care of individual migrants. To give you a sense of what that looks like, when I walked through Paso Del Norte Station yesterday, we had a quarantine cells for people with the flu, people with chicken pox, people with lice, a tremendous number of different conditions that we are trying to manage every day.
In the last four days, we’ve seen fevers of 105 degrees in infants, a two-year old suffering from seizures in the desert, a 19-year old woman with a congenital heart defect that needs emergency surgery, and a 40-year old man suffering from multi-organ failure but trying to refuse medical care.
Why is all this occurring? The increase in family units is a direct response to the vulnerabilities in our legal framework where migrants and smugglers know that they will be released and allowed to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, pending immigration proceedings that could be many years out.
Needless to say, that all plays right into Donald Trump’s narrative and, perhaps worse, it simultaneously suggests that his policies haven’t been effective at curtailing illegal immigration.
That combination is a recipe for a crackdown and now that the House failed to override Trump’s veto of a bill terminating his emergency declaration, he is emboldened.
On Friday, the president followed up on comments delivered during his Thursday night rally. Here is what he said on Twitter:
The DEMOCRATS have given us the weakest immigration laws anywhere in the World. Mexico has the strongest, & they make more than $100 Billion a year on the U.S. Therefore, CONGRESS MUST CHANGE OUR WEAK IMMIGRATION LAWS NOW, & Mexico must stop illegals from entering the U.S……..through their country and our Southern Border. Mexico has for many years made a fortune off of the U.S., far greater than Border Costs. If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING………the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week. This would be so easy for Mexico to do, but they just take our money and “talk.” Besides, we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc.), that the Border closing would be a good thing!
Got that? This is all the fault of Democrats. And also Mexico, who could stop this “so easily” if they weren’t so busy stealing America’s money and “talking”.
Again, don’t let it be lost on you that Congress passed a bipartisan resolution aimed at blocking Trump’s border “emergency”. In addition to concerns about the precedent his national emergency declaration sets in terms of wrenching the power of the purse string from lawmakers, virtually all of the evidence suggested there wasn’t in fact an “emergency” on the border.
And yet somehow, things have apparently become materially worse since Congress voted to rebuke Trump, which suggests that either the effort to manufacture a crisis has gone into overdrive, or else Trump’s own policies and rhetoric are themselves partially responsible for the situation.
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Is it in fact possible that the administration’s policies are exacerbating things? Well, of course it is.
“The influx raises questions about whether the administration may have inadvertently encouraged migrants to travel to the U.S. by pursuing and then backtracking on a zero-tolerance policy”, ABC went on to explain in the same piece linked above, adding that “after the practice of family separations collapsed amid public backlash and a federal judge’s order to reunite the families, the number of families arriving at the border steadily began to increase.”
So, even if Trump didn’t deliberately manufacture a crisis, he may have accidentally created one. Now, because he’s incapable of understanding the concept of reflexivity, the president is going to double down, potentially angering Republicans who voted against his emergency declaration and setting the stage for some kind of nightmarish standoff at the border (Because what do you imagine immigrants are going to do when they hear that the border is going to be closed entirely? Just go home?)
And with that, we’ll leave you with the following clip of what Trump told Fox News this week about how “effective” machine guns are when it comes to deterring immigrants…
When you want to get something done really badly and you tell everyone what the most effective way of doing it is, but simultaneously claim you're not thinking about doing it that way…. pic.twitter.com/FLxKq0WHXc
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) March 28, 2019
Just calling it as he see it. Go Trump!
by suggesting that an “effective” way to cut down on immigrants crossing the border is to threaten them with machine guns?
smh. there’s no introspection among Trump supporters – none.
It’s not immigrants he’s going to shut down, it’s a big proportion of our food supply, cars and electronics, etc. It’s also going to hurt Texas and, of course, that’s a big reason for this, to hurt a Democrat candidate whose making him nervous.