Tucker: Biden created an immigration crisis at America's doorstep
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host live from El Salvador examines the migrant surge unfolding at the US southern border
Today, we were in El Salvador, on the Pacific side of Central America. We were last here four years ago. We're back now to take a closer look at MS-13, now a global criminal organization.
A full investigation into MS-13 will air in an upcoming episode of our new series, "Tucker Carlson Originals," that's launching this April, on Fox Nation. We just spoke to the country's president, Nayib Bukele, at length, and asked the president about the migrant crisis that’s unfolding on America’s southern border.
Right now, we are in San Salvador. It's a compact and handsome city, a pretty place. It’s ringed by dormant volcanos. But, unlike other countries in the region, this country El Salvador, isn’t studded with high-end beach resorts or tourist hotels along the coast. There’s been comparatively little foreign investment here. There’s a reason for that. For a long time, El Salvador has been a very dangerous place. A few years ago, the Economist magazine ranked it the most violent country in the world. There’s been ongoing fighting here since the 1980s, beginning with a brutal civil war, and then extending to the government’s current battle against gangs like MS-13.
If you’re from Long Island or suburban Virginia, you know all about MS-13. You’ve read the stories about human trafficking and beheadings. MS-13 is, at this point, El Salvador’s most famous export, along with millions of low-wage workers. About a third of all Salvadorans now live in the United States, many of them illegally. Many more appear to be coming soon.
The reason: the Biden administration has declared the violence in El Salvador, and other parts of Central America, a humanitarian crisis. That means the United States now has a moral obligation to fix, and pay for that crisis. Biden has ended so-called "safe third-country agreements" that the U.S. once had with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
That means that migrants moving north without visas will no longer have to apply for asylum in the countries they come from. They can come directly to our country, no questions asked. Once they’re in the U.S., they can qualify for free healthcare, free education, and ultimately, citizenship. They won’t be deported, and they know it. Simply by crossing an international border, a line on a map, these migrants move instantly from poverty to the unimaginable benefits of the world’s most generous welfare state – our country. Who wouldn’t make that trip? Huge numbers of people are making it.
In February, Customs and Border Protection agents found more than 100,000 people trying to enter the United States illegally. Most appear to be from Central America. A year ago, for context, that number was just 34,000. There’s no precedent for an increase like that over a month. Today, we learned that several people arrested at the southern border are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. We also learned that there are now over 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children tonight in our border detention facilities – that’s more than triple the record-high under the Trump administration. Just days ago, we were told the total number was 4,000 migrant children in custody. So, the numbers have been increasing exponentially since December, and they seem likely to increase exponentially from here.
In one border facility, in Donna, Texas, the situation is now 729% over capacity. So, kids are getting hurt by definition. Is it an emergency? Well, FEMA has just been called in to help. Just two months into the Joe Biden administration, the border is officially a disaster. The administration isn't denying this. They can’t deny it. It’s on tape. Instead, they’re telling us that the tragedy they created is in fact a sign of hope.
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Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Special Assistant to the President and Coordinator for the Southern Border Roberta Jacobson, "Do you think it's a coincidence that as soon as Trump and his immigration policy were on the way out and Biden and his stated policy were on the way in, this historic surge at the border started?"
JACOBSON: "Surges tend to respond to hope…I don't know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision."
"Surges tend to respond to hope," explains reckless, arrogant bureaucrat called Roberta Jacobson who should be teaching the gender studies department in a community college, but instead, has power. Hope. Whose hope exactly? Is there anyone in our country, in the United States, who sincerely believes that what we are seeing tonight on our border will improve our country? Of course no one believes that. But it doesn’t matter, because the lives of actual Americas mean nothing to the people making these decisions. Your happiness is not a consideration. It’s never even discussed in Washington.
Instead, the rest of us are lectured that we have a duty to fix problems in countries that we don’t understand — problems that were substantially caused, not by the United States, but by other colonial powers centuries ago. So, if anyone has a legacy responsibility for what is happening in Latin America, if anyone is ultimately responsible for the millions of Latin American immigrants moving north, it’s not the United States, it’s Spain. Maybe the Spanish government could start by sending back the gold now sitting in its central bank. Where do you think that came from? El Salvador might appreciate that. But Roberta Jacobson isn’t suggesting that, it’s never occurred to her. Because the point isn’t to help the United States. In fact, the point is to punish the United States.
Official Washington agrees with that. A surge of desperate illegal immigrants is what you get when you vote for the other party, that's the message. In fact, they’re telling us the last president is responsible for all you are seeing right now. It’s a pretty remarkable claim if you think about it, given that the last president was literally elected president because everyone else in Washington thought it was somehow racist to have international borders. And yet they’re saying it, because they have no shame, and they’re convinced you’re stupid.
NANCY PELOSI: What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: The 11-year high for crossings without documentation at the border was in the middle of Trump’s presidency…This idea that it’s Joe Biden’s election that has prompted people to show up at the border is belied by the actual facts.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: Joe Biden inherited a huge mess on immigration.
REP. VERONICA ESCOBAR (D-TX): What we are seeing today is the consequence of four years of dismantling every system in place to address this with humanity and compassion.
Let’s repeat that slowly so we can get every word. "What we are seeing today" – the border crisis, "is the consequence of four years of dismantling every system in place to address this with humanity and compassion." That was Congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas. So, she’s telling you the last administration was just too liberal in its border policy. Those open-borders Trump people, they’re always warning us about that. And that’s why, just two months into a Democratic administration, holding facilities for illegal immigrant children are now at over 700 percent of capacity in her state. Donald Trump did that. Please keep talking, congresswoman, and tell us exactly how that works. Lecture us some more about humanity and compassion.
You have to wonder if these people think a single human being believes anything they say. They probably don’t care. They certainly don’t care about the country they’re supposed to be in charge of. That’s the one obvious thing. They’ve given up even trying to pretend that they are making life better for American citizens. It’s easier to yell at Americans about making life better for the rest of the world. That’s the appeal of it – it shifts the attention.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can feel like a hero when she offers free health care to the people of El Salvador. Someone who’s never had a job, giving away other people’s money. By enriching foreign nationals, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have to worry about the Americans who live in Queens - the people she’s supposed to be, is hire to represent and help. And clearly, she's not worrying about them. Ever been to her congressional district? Ever been to Detroit or Newark or Oakland or Gary, Indiana?
These are the actual places that Democrats run – the places they’re supposed to be improving. But those places have not improved, not in 50 years. They’ve become much worse. But the people in charge don’t pause to reflect on what they have done, much less apologize for it. They just move on. They head to Afghanistan or Libya or Syria, or now El Salvador. We hope the good people of Central America are ready for the Democratic Party’s version of humanity and compassion. They might want to take a quick field trip to Baltimore, just to see how it works out in the end.
In 2018, the city of Baltimore recorded a higher murder rate than the nation of El Salvador — or for that matter, the countries of Honduras, Guatemala, or Afghanistan, even. And yet, no one thought to call FEMA to help the people of Baltimore. Somebody should have. No one from Baltimore was offered asylum in El Salvador. By the way, if they are offered, they should strongly consider accepting, because it’s much safer to live with MS-13 than it is to live in Baltimore.
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It would be far safer to go to Honduras. In 2018, 30 of the 298 municipalities in Honduras reported no murders at all.
Same in Guatemala and in El Salvador, where 14 municipalities reported zero murders. That is a massive improvement over so many of our cities.
So, here’s an idea: If you’re telling us that parts of Central America are so dangerous that crime constitutes a humanitarian crisis, and that’s exactly what the Biden administration is claiming, then why not just move the people of El Salvador, or Honduras or Guatemala to safer parts of their own countries? Has that occurred to any of the professional compassion-merchants in the Biden administration?
Apparently, it hasn’t. Instead, in a cruel twist, they’re encouraging every young, ambitious person in El Salvador without family money to leave the country and head north to wash our dishes and do our laundry. How is that a compassionate program? How is it not exploiting the people of Central America? How is it good for El Salvador? It’s not. In fact, it sounds like something McKinsey and company thought up. It’s grotesque. In the name of solving an international crisis, they are, as usual, making it much worse.
The message that the Biden administration has sent to El Salvador and the countries around it couldn’t be clearer: The border is gone. We’ve erased it. Come join us. And the people of this region have heard this message.
TOM HOMAN: MIGRANTS PHOTOGRAPHED IN BIDEN T-SHIRTS AT US-MEXICO BORDER SUGGEST HE'S TO BLAME
Associated Press reporter Julie Pace said, "They don’t have a plan at the moment to get this under control. We do know that the White House is dispatching some officials to the border to try and see this situation first hand…families with young children do feel like this is a moment where they can get into the United States. They do feel like there is going to a more receptive policy from the Biden administration. So, this is the challenge that the White House has. If they don’t think that their policy actually is an open invitation then they have to signal that more clearly, because that is obviously not the way it’s being interpreted."
So if the question is: Is the Biden administration encouraging this crisis at the border? Let’s see. There are Honduran migrants on camera saying things like "Joe Biden is going to help all of us." So, yes, they are encouraging it. They’re doing it on purpose. Why are they doing it on purpose?
Here’s one clue: this week, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is set to vote on two separate bills that would grant citizenship and legal status to at least four million illegal aliens in the United States. One of those bills is called The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, and it grants amnesty to roughly one million immigrants. The only criterion: if they can prove they’ve worked in agriculture in the US for 180 days over the past two years. One hundred and eighty days. That's all it takes. That’s all American citizenship is worth at this point, apparently.
So, it's starting to make sense why Joe Biden suspended all those deportations. 180 days, that’s all it takes. And, the clock is running. But don't say that out loud in Washington. Don’t suggest impure motives to Joe Biden's Department of Homeland Security, where the watchword is always "plausible deniability." "Of course we're not working to import as many new citizens as we can into the United States, to replace all the disobedient ones who didn’t vote for us. That’s insane. A conspiracy theory straight from QAnon!"
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And, to prove it’s not true not even a little bit, the DHS secretary has warned all potential illegal immigrants to stay far away from our southern border - or else. Or else, what exactly? Or else the DHS ecretary could be mildly unhappy with them — miffed, at the very least. He’s just that kind of ruthless border protector:
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: "All I can do is communicate, both to the American public, and to the individuals seeking protection…they need to wait…We are not saying, don’t come, we are saying, don’t come now, because we will be able to deliver safe and orderly process to them as quickly as possible."
"We're not saying don't come, we are saying don't come now." Don’t come now. Come next week. We can give you more stuff.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March, 16, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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