We just got back from El Salvador, and before we left Central America, we took a COVID test – the one where the nurse rams the Q-tip up your nose and tries to find your frontal lobe until your eyes water. You’ve probably experienced it. It’s pretty unpleasant, but you’re trying to be responsible, so you endure it.

Of course, like everyone entering the United States by plane, we had no choice. The airline demanded it. We couldn’t come home until we took the test. That’s because, as they often tell us, our authorities are totally committed to keeping us safe from this deadly virus. So that’s the protocol if you’re coming from El Salvador to America legally. You take the test.

But what if you’re coming illegally? What if you rode the top of a freight train from El Salvador up through Mexico and just jumped the border when you got here?

We interviewed an active MS-13 member, a convicted murderer, who said he did exactly that. So, the question is, do people like him -- the ones who break our laws to get here -- have to submit to mandatory COVID testing once they’re apprehended by American authorities?

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The answer is, in fact, no. They don’t. Under this administration, they don’t have to, and they don’t. Illegal aliens are exempt from the public health measures that have been imposed by force on the rest of us by the U.S. government. Illegal aliens come and go as they please. No one seems to care if they spread deadly viruses to the rest of the American population.

It’s hard to believe this is actually happening, but it is. We verified it today, when DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted in congressional testimony that the Biden administration is releasing foreign nationals into American neighborhoods without even bothering to check if they’re infected with COVID. Given the authoritarian lockdowns the rest of us have lived under for the last year, the ones that have crushed the country, it’s hard to understand this policy as anything but an act of violence and hostility toward our country. It is an utter betrayal. They don’t care about you. They’re saying that clearly as they possibly can.

Joe Biden is saying it too. A reporter recently asked Biden if he planned to visit the border to see for himself the disaster unfolding there. "Not at the moment," he replied dismissively, as if he had better things to do. We’d love to know what those things are.

That same day, a reporter asked Kamala Harris what she knew about the current immigration crisis, the one her administration caused. More than 100,000 foreign nationals are flooding in every month like the border doesn’t exist. Some of them are gang members. Others appear to be on FBI terror watch lists. More than 13,000 of them are children, unaccompanied minors, now in U.S. custody. It’s an enormous, possibly unprecedented, wave of humanity coming into America right now. But Kamala Harris didn't seem to have any idea it was happening. "I haven't been briefed on anything today about it," she said. She was too busy promoting critical race theory, and making sure there are boys on your daughter’s track team. Has there ever been an administration this reckless and destructive?

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What’s happening on the border tonight will change our country forever. A lot of things won’t, but this will, and you should know that. Unlike other disasters, mass illegal immigration is permanent. No one ever really gets sent home. Over the past 30 years, the population of the United States has exploded by nearly 100 million people, mostly due to immigration. Were you even aware that happened?

You’re not supposed to say a word about it, as every year the United States gets more jammed with people, and at the same time more chaotic and less cohesive — as the open spaces shrink, as nature itself recedes in the face of yet another strip mall or apartment complex or fast food outlet to serve the new people. This is becoming a crowded country, and crowded countries are ugly, unhappy countries. Why are we letting that happen? That’s a rhetorical question of course. No one asked us what we wanted. They just did it. No one asked the countries these immigrants are coming from either.

Something that had never occurred to us until we talked to the president of El Salvador is that country has lost a third of its population over the years through immigration to the United States. El Salvador is a charming country in a lot of ways, but it’s still a very poor place. So, when American politicians offer free education and free healthcare, and free all kinds of things to anyone who can just make it across the border, millions of Salvadorans accept their offer. And why wouldn’t they accept it? So they migrate in huge groups, and that hurts our country. But it also weakens El Salvador. Here’s the president’s perspective:

NAYIB BUKELE: "If you don’t provide for your people, economic opportunities, if your economy is doing bad, if your security is doing bad, people are going to leave, and you’re going to go and try to find a rich country, right? They’re not going to leave for Guatemala. They want to go to the United States. So, that makes this country dependent on immigration because you become a net exporter of people. You’re not exporting products or services, you’re exporting people. So, that makes your economy dependent on that, because those people send money back to their home countries, which is not a good economic formula ... So it’s bad for the United States because immigration will go up and it’s bad for our country because people leaving the country will go up as well so it’s bad for both of us."

"It’s bad for both of us" -- as in, the U.S. and El Salvador, and he’s absolutely right. No one says it, but imagine if a third of the boldest, most ambitious people in your country just left. What would that mean for your future? The overfunded NGO’s and self-satisfied compassion-mongers who promote open borders haven’t thought for a moment about that, because they don’t care. They don’t even know who the president of El Salvador is.

How many of the SoulCycle moms with "No Human Is Illegal" signs on their lawns could name him? We’re guessing right around none.  But if you’re looking for conclusive evidence of how little they actually care about the Latin American servants who walk their dogs and wash their sheets, consider the almost total silence from fashionable American liberals as the Biden administration’s holding pens for immigrant children fill beyond capacity. They’re choosing to ignore it.

CBS reported Monday that "more than 4,000 children are in custody at overcrowded processing facilities – a 30% surge in the last week."

After speaking to one migrant woman the same day, CNN correspondent Rosa Flores reported that "someone stole all her money along the way ... she says it was packed with people." When asked if she was allowed to shower, the woman said "no."

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"Many discover that getting here is just the beginning. Some migrants describe crowded immigration processing centers…without showering facilities…and some say they slept under a bridge overnight."

A NBC News reporter said: "Attorneys for some of the children told us kids as young as one sometimes go days without bathing, rarely see the sun and the sound of crying is constant."

It’s bad. It’s about to get much worse. There has been a 300% increase in the number of families apprehended by Customs and Border Protection since October, and that number is rising.

Keep in mind that it takes around three weeks for migrants to make their way from Central America to the Mexican border with the U.S. So, the border gets more porous by the day. That’s intentional, the Biden administration has made it that way. Early indications suggest this month will see the largest surge of illegal entries in a generation.

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So, who are all those people coming? Well, we don’t really know who they are, and we don’t really have a good way to find out, and that’s the scariest part. In the last day, we’ve learned that at least four people arrested recently at the southern border were identified by law enforcement as "known to be or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activities."

That seems like a front page story. But it’s not. Democrats know perfectly well how unpopular open borders are with Americans of all races, so they are doing their best to suppress news about what is happening.

Veronica Escobar, who somehow got elected to Congress from Texas, will you know that if you say a single word about the border right now, you’re a racist:

Rep. Veronica Escobar, March 16: "They can either join us in being part of the solution or, my fear is, what they're going to continue to do, is to seek ways to divide our country, fuel xenophobia and racism, and I want to warn them, that their words and the fueling of that xenophobia, that racism, that hatred of the border, that fear of the border, there are consequences to that language and that rhetoric."

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"Divide the country," said the people who are letting in millions of foreign nationals with no right to be here, against the will of the population.

It’s interesting to watch a demagogue like that yap into a camera, and then compare her to a leader who actually cares about the people he represents. In our conversation, the president of El Salvador took responsibility for the fact that millions have left his country. El Salvador needs better security and more opportunity, and he seemed to mean it as he said it.

Compare that to an incompetent like Gavin Newsom, or a race-baiter like Veronica Escobar of Texas. Those kind of people blame White supremacy and QAnon for their failures, and then they keep going, they never look back. It’s pathetic.

Joe Biden isn’t much different. Biden knows the American public doesn’t want a million new poor people showing up illegally this year. Our country can’t handle that, obviously, especially not right now. Once again, open borders aren’t popular with anyone. They’re not popular with Hispanics, by the way. All the guilty White liberals assume Hispanics love illegal immigration. They don’t. They’re Americans, why would they love it?

Biden’s now trying to blame the whole thing on Trump, of course. Apparently, the promise of a border wall was a massive lure to Central Americans trying to sneak in. Pretty funny. But at the same time, not so subtly, Biden is telling more illegal aliens to come here. He was on "Good Morning America" Wednesday letting the world know that America’s top priority is making foreign nationals comfortable in the United States.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have to say, quite clearly, 'don’t come'?

BIDEN: "Yes, I can say quite clearly don’t come and what we’re in the process of getting set up, and it’s not going to take a whole long time, is to be able to apply for asylum in place. So don’t leave your town or city or community, we’re going to make sure we have facilities in those cities and towns, run by the DHS and also access with HHS, the Health and Human Services to say, you can apply for asylum from where you are right now."

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Oh, got it. So just don’t come yet, we’re not quite ready. And by the way, don’t trouble yourself. We’ll come to you. We’re going to spend whatever it takes to make the whole process easier for you, so that more people from your country can move to our country, entirely at our expense. That’s our promise to the world. We hate ourselves enough that we mean it.

Has any country ever promised something like this to the world? Can any country survive once it has? Joe Biden hasn’t thought about that. He doesn’t care. None of them care. All they know is that the Democratic Party will never lose again once they pull this off, and that’s all that matters to them.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 17, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."