Seven Heartbreaks Caused by Joe Biden’s Progressive Border Policy

Migrants heading to the border with Guatemala on their way to the United States, march in
ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Republican leaders are spotlighting the heartbreak, costs, and chaos caused by President Joe Biden’s promise to welcome poor economic migrants who can survive the long trek to the United States border.

“It’s more than a crisis,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said March 15 in a TV-ready press conference at the border:

This is a human heartbreak. The sad part about all this — it didn’t have to happen. This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There’s no other way to it than a Biden border crisis.

The border chaos exists because Biden’s progressive deputies are determined to shoehorn many migrants into America through whatever regulatory, judicial, and legislative side-doors they can find or create. They are pushing for this immigration expansion, regardless of the deep and rational public opposition to the business-backed inflow of wage-cutting, rent-boosting, poverty-expanding migrants as the nation climbs out of a massive recession.

The progressives’ determination to extract economically-valuable migrants out of Central and South America wrecks those regions’ local economies, making it easier for progressives to extract more migrants.

As each wave of migrants leaves to accept the progressives’ dangled dollars, the left-behind children feel the emotional loss of absent parents, experience political and economic stagnation in their towns, and soon submit to the American dollar’s gravitational control over their lives and status.

Here are seven examples of migrants who tried — or still want to try — to accept Biden’s invite to the Hunger Games-style obstacle course to the Golden Side-doors:

  1. The New York Times reported March 14 from the U.S.-Mexico border:

Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old Guatemalan mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed in a seat as Mr. Valenzuela handed out hand sanitizer.

“I did not make it,” she sobbed into the phone as she spoke with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.

“Biden promised us!” wailed another woman.

Many of the migrants said they had spent their life savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers — who had falsely promised them that the border was open after President Biden’s election. Still, the migrants keep coming, and many officials believe the numbers could be bigger than those seen in recent years, after the pandemic and recent natural disasters in Central America wiped away livelihoods.

  1. The Washington Post reported March 13:

REYNOSA, Mexico — Nicole, 15, and Joshua, 13, grew up with a photo of their mom in the living room and a promise that one day they would see her again.

Their mother left El Salvador for Maryland when they were toddlers, unsure how long she would stay, certain only that she had to leave if she were ever to pry her family out of poverty. Twelve years later, she had saved enough money — the smuggler charged more than $10,000 — for her kids to travel north.

On Dec. 14, a few yards south of the U.S. border on an international bridge where the smuggler had left them, Mexican police stopped the pair. “I begged them, ‘Please, please let us pass,’” Nicole said through tears. “But instead they brought us here.”

…

Until then, Nicole and Joshua — who gave only their first names for fear they could be identified if returned to El Salvador — had thought of their own journey as a two-person exodus, not part of a flow, a surge or a crisis. They are now among more than 700 children who have wound up at the Center for Attention to Border Minors in Reynosa, just south of McAllen, Tex., since December. Nearly all of those unaccompanied children were detained by Mexican soldiers or police before they could present themselves to U.S. immigration agents.

  1. On January 30, the Los Angeles Times reported the deaths of 19 migrants killed by gunmen as they approached the cartel-controlled U.S.-Mexico border. The victims included 15-year-old Robelson Isidro:

He earned just $3 a day toiling in the coffee fields around Comitancillo, a largely indigenous town in Guatemala’s western highlands. With a few years of American wages, he hoped to buy the family a house.

The [Guatemalan] community has a long history of sending migrants to the United States, and [Isidro] had uncles who lived there. They had indoor kitchens. They didn’t have to cook outside under a tarp.

“He was ashamed,” his mother said in a phone interview. She said he told her: “I’m going to fight to make my dreams come true. I have to get my siblings ahead in life. I’m going to get them out of poverty.”

  1. The Los Angles Times reported February 26 on Douglas, a young Guatemalan man who sought to join his father who had migrated to Los Angeles five years ago:

The smuggler was long gone; though Douglas yelled and yelled, no one came. The 21-year-old and a dozen other migrants already had been wandering in the desolate desert landscape around Van Horn, Texas, for two days when the snowstorm began.

When he heard cries for help off in the distance, Douglas left the others and set off in the dark to try and find a man who’d become separated from the group. He came upon the older man and put his arm over his shoulder, dragging him through the snow until he finally stumbled on a road and couldn’t go any farther, he said.

…

Then, out of the blackness, he heard officials telling him: “Open your eyes, open your eyes.” When he finally could open them, he was in a hospital bed in El Paso, about 110 miles from where he was found unconscious. What he saw were his frostbitten hands: swollen to the size of baseball gloves; fingers lumpy and gray; oozing, raw skin seemingly ready to fall off in chunks.

Healthcare workers at the University Medical Center of El Paso told Douglas’ lawyer and his uncle Joel, who’d traveled from San Francisco, that his hands probably need to be amputated.

  1. On March 15, the Los Angeles Times reported on the deaths of 13 migrants who packed themselves into an SUV racing northwards from the border. The victims included a prosperous young woman training to be a lawyer:

Yesenia Magali Melendrez Cardona told her father she wanted to follow in his footsteps. He had made the trek from Guatemala to the U.S. 15 years earlier in search of a new life. In February, she left a job and her [legal] studies behind and headed north.

Chiquimulilla, the town where she had spent her 23 years, had been ravaged by the pandemic. Unemployment was rising. The population was desperate. The streets were too dangerous to walk at night.

A maroon Ford Expedition bore a suspected smuggler and 24 people racing toward what they hoped would be safety. Yesenia and her mother, Verlyn Cardona, were wedged in the back when it drove through a breach in the fence separating Mexico from California. It was broadsided by a semi hauling two empty trailers. It came to a stop, windshield shattered at the intersection of Highway 115 and Norrish Road.

Seventeen passengers were ejected from the SUV. When Verlyn regained consciousness in the back of the crumpled vehicle, her daughter was sprawled across her legs. Dead.

…

The last time Melendrez saw and hugged his daughter, she was 6. Although he was in another country, he said, the two remained in close contact.

  1. The Wall Street Journal reported from Guatemala on March 9:

“People here say it is a good moment to leave, to be at the border,” said Ms. [Gloria] Velásquez, 32. “The rumor is that children are allowed to enter.”

She said she has been considering going with her 10-year-old daughter Helen Ixchel, or sending her alone.

Usually the family finds a “trusted person” in the community, who is often a deported migrant who knows the route well, to bring the children to the border, with the hopes they can reunite with relatives in the U.S., Ms. Velásquez said. But she said she has been postponing the decision as she considers the journey to be too dangerous.

  1. On March 11 Vice reported the story of a Cuban migrant who was kidnapped at the U.S. border after spending months trekking through the South American jungles:

MATAMOROS, Mexico — The men knelt on the floor side by side, heads down, hands behind their backs, while a man with his face covered waved a gun wildly in their faces. “Call her,” the man with the gun instructed one of them. “On speakerphone.”

“Listen, honey,” the man frantically said when his wife picked up, before the man with the gun snatched the phone away.

“I have your husband and his friend,” he snarled. “I want you to make a deposit for $4,000. I’ll send you the account number. If you don’t do it, I’ll kill him.”

VICE World News has obtained footage of this kidnapping, which shows two political asylum seekers from Cuba pleading for their lives.

…

One experience is seared in his memory: A Haitian woman lay on the jungle floor dying from thirst, begging the Cuban to give her water. But he couldn’t; he needed the water if he was going to survive. “Every time I close my eyes, it’s like I relive that moment. It’s lacerating to see a person die. The sense of guilt is overwhelming.”

GOP legislators are learning to blame Biden and his progressives for the harm to migrants after three years watching while Democrats and their allies in the media magnified the “kids in cages” problem to animate Democrat voters in the 2020 election.

“We are a compassionate nation, but lawlessness is not compassion,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) said at McCarthy’s press conference, adding:

Aiding and abetting cartels is not compassion. Putting in policies that allow them to abuse women on the journey is not compassion. Allowing them to grow and be funded into a destabilizing force in these [Central American] nations that are trying to thrive and survive and create a thriving economy for their people is not compassion

…

We have turned the people who’ve signed up to protect our border into the last mile delivery system of the cartel migrant human trafficking organization… We can fix this, we can secure our border, we can protect the lives of these people, and we can keep this nation strong and help push back the cartel influence in our nation and throughout Central and South America.

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