Joe Biden has been roasted for his policies on the U.S.-Mexico border by two hardline Trump-supporting politicians and the governor of Texas, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki described as ‘morally reprehensible’ the people smugglers who dropped two children over the border fence – but had no answers as to how to prevent it reoccurring.
Biden’s approach to the border has been drawing attention for several weeks.
He has appointed Kamala Harris, the vice president, to oversee efforts to improve the situation, but the number of arrivals is causing concern.
Border Patrol agents are currently detaining 5,000 migrants a day, and the Department of Homeland Security expects approximately 500,000 to 800,000 migrants to arrive as part of a family group during the 2021 fiscal year that ends in September.
The number would equal or exceed the record numbers who entered in 2019, according to government data reviewed by The Washington Post.
Jim Jordan, a member of the House representing Ohio, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Thursday night with a scathing assessment of the situation.
‘Today you cannot get into your Capitol, but anybody and everybody can get into your country,’ he said.
Jim Jordan, a Congressman representing Ohio, on Thursday night was scathing about Biden’s border policies
Mark Meadows (left) and Jim Jordan (center) said that Biden was wrong to reverse Trump’s border policies
‘It’s not a crisis on the border, its chaos on the border.’
Jordan said it was ‘chaos’ because the Biden administration reversed three of Trump’s key policies.
‘Remainder Mexico while you’re being processed. They undid that,’ he said.
‘They said no more deportation. They announce to the world we will not finish the wall.
‘Those three things changed everything and you get this terrible situation causing harm to kids and women in all kinds of people on the border.
‘That’s the Biden administration. That’s how ridiculous, that is how crazy today’s left is.’
Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, agreed, telling Hannity that Biden had ‘said basically we are open for business.’
He added: ‘Come on in. Send anybody from Central America and Mexico. We’ll let you come in.’
Meadows said that the Biden administration ‘were warned’ about the message their more humane policies would send.
‘President Trump had the right policy. We need to return to that,’ he said.
‘It will keep Americans safer and actually it will keep those coming across our southern border safer as well.’
Meadows spoke amid widespread horror at two young girls being dropped 14ft from the top of the border fence, and left in the New Mexico desert alone at night to be collected by the Border Patrol.
On Thursday the girls were said to be doing well, despite their ordeal, and remarkably without any broken bones or other injuries.
Gloria Chavez, chief of the El Paso sector for the Border Patrol, told Fox News they were sisters aged five and two from Ecuador.
She said they are ‘doing fine’ and are ‘so resilient’.
‘I was really horrified and appalled and worried when I first saw the images come through from my staff,’ Chavez told host Neil Cavuto.
‘When I saw that first child dropped to the ground and then not see her move for a few seconds, I honestly thought this child just probably hit her head and is unconscious.
‘And then I see the second child and immediately DHS, obviously, within a few minutes responded to that area to rescue them.’
She said their mother had been located, in New York.
‘When I visited with these little girls, they were so loving and so talkative, some of them were asking the names of all the agents that were there around them, and they even said they were a little hungry,’ Chavez recalled.
‘So I helped them peel a banana and open a juice box and just talked to them. You know, children are just so resilient and I’m so grateful that they’re not severely injured or [have] broken limbs or anything like that.’
Gloria Chavez, of the El Paso sector of the Border Patrol, said that the two little girls were ‘resilient’ and doing well
Psaki, the White House press secretary, called the smugglers who dropped two toddlers over a border fence ‘morally reprehensible’, but declined to say what the administration is doing to combat the migrant surge.
Psaki said anyone who saw the video from US Customs Border and Protection of two children being dropped over the 14-foot high fence would be alarmed by it.
‘Any of us who saw the video, were incredibly alarmed by the steps of smugglers ones that we have been quite familiar with that we’ve spoken out about our concerns, she said.
She went on to say ‘the inhumane way smugglers abused children while profiting off parents’ desperation is criminal and morally reprehensible. The president certainly agrees with that and these kids, I believe were rescued from by individuals who are working at the border.’
The girls were rescued by agents and taken to the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station for medical evaluation.
But Psaki didn’t say what the administration was doing to discourage such actions other than to reiterate the message that the border is closed.
Mexican smugglers have been caught on camera dropping two toddlers over a 14-foot-high border barrier into the US (pictured)
‘I will say that our concern and our focus is on sending a clear message to smugglers, to the region, that this is not the time to come,’ she said at her daily White House press briefing. ‘You should not send your kids on this treacherous journey that these smugglers are preying on vulnerabilities in these communities.’
‘There’s a lot of issues and steps we need to address root causes, so of course our concern is for the safety of these kids, these border patrol agents who save these kids deserve our thanks and our gratitude,’ she added.
The disturbing footage released by CBP Wednesday captures the moment two female toddlers from Ecuador, aged three and five, were dumped over the wall just west of Mt. Cristo Rey, near El Paso, Texas, Tuesday evening.
The CBP said the young children, who are sisters, had been mistreated and abandoned by human smugglers.
The girls are just two of the record 16,000 children who crossed the US-Mexico border in March.
Thousands of families and unaccompanied children have entered the US along its southern border since Joe Biden took office and vowed to make immigration rules more ‘humane’.
However, the influx has led to a bottleneck at custody centers with migrants penned in to facilities that are at around 1,700 percent capacity while smugglers in Mexico are making a living off exploiting migrants heading north to the US.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the smugglers caught on camera dropping two toddlers over a fence at the border ‘morally reprehensible’
Cameras set up along the border caught the moment two smugglers dropped the children from the roughly 14-foot high border barrier under the cover of darkness.
An adult was seen on the Mexico side dangling the first child over the US side before letting go, leaving her to fall to the ground below.
The smuggler repeats this with the second child before they are seen instantly running away from the area with another smuggler back into Mexico.
The CBP said the children were left vulnerable to the desert elements on the ground but were luckily spotted by the camera operator who alerted Santa Teresa agents.
The agents hunted for the children and found them, taking them to a local hospital for ‘precautionary reasons and further evaluation’, the CBP said.
The two sisters were then medically cleared and taken to a temporary Border Patrol facility.
Disturbing footage released by US Customs Border and Protection Wednesday captures the moment two female toddlers from Ecuador, aged three and five, were dumped over the wall just west of Mt. Cristo Rey, near El Paso, Texas, Tuesday evening
The girls, who were rescued by agents and taken to the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station for medical evaluation, while the two smugglers ran away
Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, told Hannity on Thursday that Biden had ‘created an open season for human traffickers, drug smugglers, cartels and gangs.’
He added: ‘This problem is not going to be fixed until the Biden administration does its job to secure our border and to get this crisis under control.’
Abbott said that he had been shocked on Tuesday to see migrants moving in large numbers across his state, even in daylight.
‘We were flying over today and in the middle of the day, it used to be people would come over at night. Not during the day,’ he told Hannity.
‘In the middle of the day there were busloads after busloads after busloads of people loading buses who had just come across the border as we were flying over today.’
He said they were asking the federal government to repay the money Texas was spending on law enforcement along the border.
He said his agents were regularly detaining criminals.
The shocking incident with the two girls came just two weeks after a Texas rangers and Border Patrol agents were forced to rescue a six-month-old baby from the Rio Grande river after smugglers threw the infant to die in the waters.
The horrific incident unfolded back on March 16 in Roma, Texas, after the infant’s mom was assaulted and left with a broken leg by a group of smugglers in Mexico, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The mother had paid smugglers $3,500 to take her and her baby across the Rio Grande river that borders Mexico and the US, reported KVEO.
Texas DPS Lt. Christopher Olivarez said she had been waiting to cross from Mexico to the US since December and was finally placed on a raft with 67 other adults and 150 children on March 16.
During the journey, one of the smugglers then threw her baby from the raft into the water.
Meanwhile a mom was assaulted and her six-month-old baby was tossed off a raft into the Rio Grande river where six other migrants drowned. Pictured a member of the South Texas Special Operations Group of the Texas Rangers holding the child after it was pulled from the water
The South Texas Special Operations Group, Texas Rangers Division was assisting US border patrol agents at the time.
They spotted the incident and managed to save the infant from the water.
The baby survived and its mother was also rescued from the smugglers.
Olivarez said they were reunited and are now ‘safe’ in Border Patrol custody.
Authorities shared a photo of a member of the South Texas Special Operations Group of the Texas Rangers holding the child after it was pulled from the water.
This week, at least six migrants reportedly found drowned in the Rio Grande river after trying to make the perilous journey toward the US.
The bodies of six migrants were found in a shallow, narrow part of the river by Eagle Pass Tuesday night, according to Newsmax.
Eagle Pass, Texas. Another shallow, narrow part of the Rio Grande. An Eagle Pass police officer tells me they found 6 bodies right around here earlier tonight pic.twitter.com/Nto1hD8Z3s
— Logan Ratick (@Logan_Ratick) March 31, 2021
The bodies of six migrants were found in a shallow, narrow part of the river by Eagle Pass Tuesday night, according to Newsmax
A family of migrants cross the Rio Bravo river in El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Tuesday
Thousands of families and unaccompanied children have entered the US along its southern border in recent weeks
Central American migrants cross the Rio Bravo in an attempt to get from Ciudad Juarez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, to El Paso, Texas, Tuesday
Migrants are detained by a US Border Patrol agent after crossing the Rio Bravo river from Mexico
The horrifying incidents reveal the dangers facing migrants as they try to make their way into the US from Mexico, given both the perilous conditions crossing the rivers on cramped rafts and the dangers of trusting smugglers.
The Mexican government last week vowed it was limiting nonessential travel on the Guatemala border, shutting down migrant crossings and deploying security forces to clampdown on the flow of migrants from Guatemala into the country before people head north into the US.
But the reality is smugglers make a living off passing migrants entering Mexico, passing through the country and crossing into the US.
Around 16,000 minors have crossed the US-Mexico border in March, with 5,767 children in CBP custody on Sunday, according to CBP data.
Additionally, there are 11,886 children in the custody of Health and Human Services, meaning the Biden administration has more than 17,500 children in custody.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration finally allowed journalists inside the Donna facility in Texas for the first time, after weeks of shutting the media out and releasing their own photos.
It revealed more than 4,000 migrants, including children and families, crammed into pods with the facility now at 1,700 percent capacity.
Media were allowed in to see the border facilities on Texas this week, with shocking scenes like the one above at the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility (file photo)
Children are being crammed into the at the shelters like the one above, the Donna Department of Homeland Security, for weeks on end after a huge increase in March in the number of unaccompanied migrants
Border guards say 14 per cent – roughly one in seven – of the migrant children have tested positive for COVID while photos also show detainees being treated for lice, amid fears of an outbreak.
Two thousand children have already overstayed their 72-hour legal limit and at least 39 have been stuck in the cramped quarters for two weeks.
US border officials estimate that up to 184,000 unaccompanied migrant children could arrive at the US-Mexico border this year, according to internal government data reviewed by Reuters.
If accurate, it would be higher than any other year on record since 2010, when CBP began to fully track apprehensions of unaccompanied children.
The next-highest annual total occurred during a spike in 2019 under Donald Trump when around 76,000 unaccompanied children were taken into custody at the border.
