Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any spending bill that didn’t have more than token border enforcement and wall funding provisions included.  All of those threats proved to be empty. 

In fact, Trump signed onto a spending bill that apparently guts efforts to enforce the border—at this point we don’t have to wait for judges to tell us whether the law actually mandates releasing all migrants with children into the United States, since the migrants themselves are doing the interpreting for us, coming in droves and dragging kids along with them, and our own government is releasing them into the country—nearly a 110,000 and counting over the last three months, with the “mother of all caravans” forming in Honduras.  U.S. officials are now estimating that 1.5 million of the invaders may bless us with their presence this year. 

Donald Trump, you may recall, was elected on an “America First!” platform that highlighted controlling immigration and protecting our borders—the whole point of “MAGA” was supposed to be that the troops would come home, American industry would be revitalized, and wages would rise as immigration was curtailed, giving Middle America at least a chance of revitalizing itself. Yet the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force on earth has so far done nothing apart from deciding to cut aid programs to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, home of many of the “migrants” who are crashing our national gates at this moment, a gesture that seems as pathetic as whining about Mexico doing nothing to stop them from coming. 

The US “hyper power” is proving to be as impotent and ineffectual as the most dysfunctional banana republic.  The president of the Capital of the Whole World and Universal Nation, of course, can’t take emergency measures (instead of merely declaring an emergency) to repel an invasion—but the president of a real country with definite national interests could.? 

We elected Trump so the border collapse we are now witnessing wouldn’t happen. He had one job: protect and defend this country, just maybe giving the people who voted for him a chance to preserve something for our posterity. If he wants to stanch the bleeding, he can begin by closing the border, firing people in his administration who will not act to defend our sovereignty, and finding his misplaced presidential pen to sign executive orders on ending chain migration and birthright citizenship. ?

 

[Image via Palácio do Planalto from Brasilia, Brasil [CC BY 2.0]]