I wrote today on the home page about the Trump team’s approach that avoided what we’ve seen in Del Rio over the last week:
Alejandro Mayorkas likes to say that our border isn’t open.
This line rang particularly hollow on Monday when he said it in close proximity to a migrant camp where people were coming and going freely across the Rio Grande and had to take tickets to wait to get formally apprehended by U.S. authorities.
It’s one thing to say the border isn’t open, it’s another to implement the policies and do the work to keep it under control.
The Biden team tells the story that it is constantly undone by circumstances at the border — “seasonality” creating a surge last spring, climate change hurting agriculture in the Northern Triangle, the coup in Haiti — but there’s a reason that scene at the Del Rio bridge happened on Biden’s watch and not his predecessor’s.