Who could’ve imagined a scenario where allowing tens of thousands of unknown people to cross the border unchecked and untested would lead to a further outbreak of disease and help propel the spread of Covid-19 and the Delta variant? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorka certainly never imagined that scenario despite the fact that he is in charge of keeping America safe and secure, which includes safety from pandemic diseases.
As thousands and thousands of Haitian migrants crossed the border this month and set up an encampment in Del Rio, Texas, the Biden administration was doing admittedly nothing to ensure that the situation didn’t turn into a Covid superspreader.
In the strangest of worlds, travelers from countries like Canada and the U.K. are held to strict requirements of required vaccinations and in some cases proving a negative Covid test to board a plane, yet migrants are able to walk into the county every day by the thousands without so much as having their temperature taken.
The Biden administration recently disclosed that upwards of 1 in 5 of migrants making border crossings have some kind of disease or illness, which includes Covid-19:
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday he did not expect such a surge in the Delta Covid-19 variant as he admitted that the ‘rate of illness’ at the southern border is now 20%.
‘What I didn’t expect was the tragic rise of the delta variant,’ the secretary said at the virtual Immigration Law and Policy Conference Monday afternoon. ‘And we took a step back by reason of that. I did not expect to be in late September where we are.’
He said that one in five migrants are showing up at the border with an ‘illness.’
‘We are confronted with a population of people that, as a general matter, that have a rate of illness of approximately 20%.’
‘When one is speaking of 7,000 or 7,500 people encountered at the border every day, if one takes a look at that the system, it is not built for that in a Covid environment where isolation is required,’ Mayorkas said.
Think of the scenario happening right now. Out of 10,000 migrants that cross the border, around 2,000 of them could be infected with something, likely with Covid-19. Out of those 2,000, they will end up being bussed to other detention facilities or simply released pending a hearing date. What this does, of course, is help take that illness and spread it all along the way as these people are transported and come in contact with new potential carriers.
It’s almost a nightmare scenario and one which could have been prevented if the Biden administration had continued, in the name of public health, with a policy of deporting anyone who attempted to cross the border given the situation with Covid-19 and the Delta variant specifically.
Mayorkas said last week that of course the migrants are not being tested for Covid because DHS does not have the capacity to do so:
On Friday, Mayorkas had told reporters that he did not know how many of the nearly 17,000 once camped out under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas had contracted Covid-19 as DHS was not testing the migrants.
‘We did not test that population of individuals,’ Mayorkas said. ‘We do not know, I do not know, I should say if I may be perfectly accurate, I do not know if anyone was sick with COVID. We certainly had some people get sick, not with COVID to my knowledge and we addressed their illnesses.’
With the Biden administration leaning hard on every American to get vaccinated against Covid-19, it’s almost surreal that thousands and thousands of people are allowed to enter the country unfettered every day without any attempt to screen or isolate those carrying disease or illness. As Mayorkas also said, border crossing detention centers and facilities are simply not designed to isolate groups of people or screen for diseases.
If the Biden administration has been caught this off guard and this derelict in its duty to protect Americans from foreign dangers, where is the accountability from the president himself? His policies have created a situation where more and more immigrants are seeking to enter the country illegally and few if any of them will be screened or vaccinated against Covid-19.
A truly bizarre situation for the Biden administration to be admitting how poorly it has failed at preventing the rampant spread of Covid-19 at the U.S. southern border, then blaming states like Texas for having higher than average infection rates.
