Some readers will remember “Baghdad Bob,” the Saddam Hussein regime’s spokesman during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, who confidently claimed “There are no American tanks in Baghdad!” as American tanks were literally in the background.
The Biden administration has its own Baghdad Bob — White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Some of her pronouncements are just silly, like her claim that the decrepit President Biden has so much energy “I can’t even keep up with him.”
But this week’s howler was a much more consequential lie.
When asked about congressional concerns about the border crisis, she said, “The president has done more to secure the border, to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else. He really has.”
You might dismiss this as a laughable but harmless fairy tale, like Biden’s supposedly boundless energy, but it has real policy consequences. The border crisis the president sparked on Inauguration Day has continued unabated ever since.
Nearly 7 million illegal aliens have been “encountered” on Biden’s watch, the highest number ever.
And of those, close to 3 million have been released into the United States (the others were expelled under the now-defunct Title 42 or were just the same people being counted multiple times for multiple attempts).
It would be more accurate to say that Biden has done more to undermine the border than anyone else. “He really has.”
In a bad sign for the White House, even the regime-adjacent media are beginning to acknowledge that its claims are malarkey.
This week The Washington Post reported that Border Patrol arrests of border-jumpers climbed more than 30% in August, on top of a 30%-plus increase in July. And of the average of nearly 6,000 border-infiltrators a day last month, about half were in “family migrant units” — illegal immigrants bringing children with them — the highest level ever recorded.
Why is this happening? Is it climate change? Gang violence? Transphobia?
No. As my Center for Immigration Studies colleague Todd Bensman reported in the New York Post — three months ago — the administration’s supposedly tough rules following the end of Title 42 expulsions in May aren’t applied to illegal aliens bringing kids with them.
Immigrant families with children have now figured out that, if they cross illegally and turn themselves in under the supposedly harsh new strategy, Biden’s Border Patrol will very quickly admit all of them right into the American heartland just like when the government exempted them from Title 42.
To borrow from “Field of Dreams,” If you release them, they will come.
