If you’re like most Americans, you may be wondering why the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border happened all at once. People want to know the cause and what could have been done to prevent it.
While answers have been scarce, the Washington Post has published a rather damning piece which claims that the Obama administration was warned ahead of time that this was going to happen.
David Nakamura, Jerry Markon and Manuel Roig-Franzia contributed to this report:
Obama aides were warned of brewing border crisisNearly a year before President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis on the border, a team of experts arrived at the Fort Brown patrol station in Brownsville, Tex., and discovered a makeshift transportation depot for a deluge of foreign children.Thirty Border Patrol agents were assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through Texas patrol stations in 2013. In a 41-page report to the Department of Homeland Security, the team from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) raised alarms about the federal government’s capacity to manage a situation that was expected to grow worse.The researchers’ observations were among the warning signs conveyed to the Obama administration over the past two years as a surge of Central American minors has crossed into south Texas illegally. More than 57,000 have entered the United States this year, swamping federal resources and catching the government unprepared.The administration did too little to heed those warnings, according to interviews with former government officials, outside experts and immigrant advocates, leading to an inadequate response that contributed to this summer’s escalating crisis.
Steven Hayward of Powerline puts things in perspective:
Nothing Happens for No Good ReasonMy great teacher of foreign policy and strategic studies, the late Harold Rood, had a simple maxim at the heart of his analytical technique: “Nothing happens for no good reason.” This maxim has come back to me watching the saga of the flood of “unaccompanied alien children” (as the government officially calls them) on our southern border. Everyone seems to be treating this as though it was a random or unpredictable event, like a hurricane or winter snowstorm, seemingly spontaneous, and building a momentum of its own.It is extremely unlikely that this is a spontaneous phenomenon.
Democrats continue to paint the border crisis as a spontaneous humanitarian refugee situation but as new details emerge, it looks more and more like a planned event and something the White House knew was coming.
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