The end of Title 42 brought a record number of migrants to the southern border, including an Afghan terrorist caught trying to sneak into California and a child who died in the custody of Health and Human Services—the second minor who has perished on the Biden administration's watch.
Sounds like a humanitarian tragedy, a policy disaster, a political nightmare. But not if you hear the Biden administration tell it! Speaking at a swanky fundraiser in Atlanta on Friday as this scene was playing out, Vice President Kamala Harris—President Joe Biden named her border czar, remember?—declared that things down south are "going rather smoothly."
We'd hate to hear what "bumpy" looks like. President Biden, meanwhile—he's on vacation in Rehoboth Beach—said that things at the border are going "much better than you all expected." Low bar.
Elections have consequences, and the situation on the southern border is a direct result of policies Biden and Harris put in place on their first day in office. Border wall construction came to a halt, and among other things the Biden administration put an end to the "Remain in Mexico" policy that required asylum seekers to wait in a third country until their claims were adjudicated.
Our colleague Joe Simonson was in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, last week, and he saw the situation firsthand. Some holding facilities reached more than 200 percent capacity over the weekend. Conditions in at least one of those facilities was so poor that a 17-year-old child from Honduras died, and the Biden administration has cut most of the migrants loose. It's the administration's only answer.
Even Democrats are starting to notice. New York City mayor Eric Adams—who once said that "New York City is, and has always been, a city of immigrants" and pledged that his government would "reflect that"—now says there is "no room" in his city for migrants.
Adams is converting public school gyms and shuttered prisons into shelters for aliens arriving by the hundreds. "No city should be going through this," Adams said.
No country should, either.