RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TEXAS — Over the weekend, Townhall was given an exclusive on-the-ground look at how President Joe Biden's immigration policies have created multiple crises along the southwest border. While the president, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and many Democrats refuse to even use the word "crisis" to describe things, barely 30 hours along the Rio Grande make it clear why December set another all-time record for the number of illegal immigrants encountered by border agents. What follows shows just a sliver of the border crisis, but tells much of the story Biden doesn't want Americans to notice.
Thanks to National Border Patrol Council Vice President Chris Cabrera, Townhall had a front-row seat as almost two dozen illegal immigrants — including four unaccompanied children — surrendered themselves to border agents to claim asylum at just one gate in the border wall within 90 minutes of arriving there on Friday night. While the one single adult in the group of illegal immigrants was separated from the unaccompanied children and family units for transport away from the border wall, all 22 of them are expected to be processed and released with an initial court date between six months and six years from now. None are likely to be deported.
Along that same portion of the border wall in Hidalgo, Texas, ladders could be seen strewn around the interior side of the wall. Some were made out of wood, tossed in a pile near a dumpster at the foot of the small hill atop which the border wall stands. Other homemade ladders were pieced together out of thin rebar — weaker than the wooden ones and more prone to collapse under the weight of illegal immigrants seeking to surge across the border at multiple locations to lessen the chance of capture by stretched-thin border agents.
While observing border agents at the gate in Hidalgo, they could be seen tossing a few more of the rebar ladders down the hill. Each one is more evidence that the halfhearted command of "do not come" from Vice President/Border Czar Kamala Harris does nothing to contradict the invitation for more illegal immigration created by the administration's catch-and-release policies.
Illegal immigrants, however, don't even need ladders to breach the border just a few miles west in Mission, Texas. There, the "Junk Yard Bar" also known as Cabrera's Bar sits in a spot where there's a significant gap in the border wall. The bar predates the wall, and the gap was initially intentional — to temporarily allow large vehicles to move back and forth along the wall while it was under construction — but Biden's order to halt border wall construction made it a permanent feature.
What was meant to be a temporary and functional passage through the wall became a lasting demonstration of the failure of the Biden administration's border policies. Now, illegal immigrants run through the family-run establishment every night. When the owner checks on it in the morning, he often finds them still on his property and in his bar.
Even though there's a gate that's monitored by border patrol when manpower allows (and the occasional border pup), it's just a few yards from the significantly larger hole in the wall that's an exclamation point on what the phrase "open-border policies" really means.
A short distance away from the hole-in-the-border-wall bar sits more private property used by illegal immigrants as a route for those who seek to avoid apprehension by U.S. officials. After crossing the river less than half a mile away, illegal immigrants make their way through the brush and to a fence line where large holes have been cut to allow quick transit. Next to the fence is a road where they are often picked up by smugglers for the U.S. portion of their journey.
Despite witnessing migrants turning themselves into border agents to claim asylum and the very visible openness of the international border as a direct result of Biden's executive orders and policy directives, Townhall was not allowed by the Biden administration to tour the Central Processing Center for illegal immigrants in McAllen. It's the same facility that was stood up in response to worsening conditions at the border in 2014 by the Obama administration — complete with segmented areas within a warehouse divided by chainlink fences. The same one that, years later, suddenly became the origin of the "kids in cages" narrative used to attack the Trump administration — despite Obama being the one that first built the cages and originally put unaccompanied children and family units inside them.
If, as Biden and his administration claim, the border is not in crisis even as it continues to break records, why wouldn't the Biden administration want to show reporters how normal things are at its illegal immigrant processing center?
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and his bipartisan delegation in McAllen for the weekend were allowed access to the facility — but even lawmakers were barred from taking photos of the interior beyond a few shots of the congressional delegation in the entryway and nondescript hallways. This denial of access and refusal to allow documentation, notably, comes at the direction of the Biden administration which pledged to be the most transparent in U.S. history.
Later, in a one-on-one interview with Chairman McCaul while we traveled back to McAllen from the Rio Grande in Mission following the delegation's boat tour with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Republican explained how the national security risk caused by the open border is one the United States "can't afford."
Biden's border crisis, as far too many Americans know for tragic reasons, doesn't stay at the Rio Grande and border walls in South Texas. As a clear reminder of that fact, anyone taking the first flight out of McAllen International Airport on Sunday found the TSA Pre-Check line full of illegal immigrants who had been processed and were being flown into the U.S. interior — without the identification this writer was required to show in order to board the same plane.
Some of the illegal immigrants headed onward from a brief layover in Houston on flights to Boston, New York, and D.C. Just a small fraction of the millions of illegal immigrants who've been processed and released into the U.S. since Biden took office and implemented catch-and-release while increasing the incentives for unlawful entry to the country.
These are the images that Biden refuses to call a crisis, an open border, or a problem of his creation. No matter how many times Biden and his administration lie about what's happening along the border and spreading into the country, it won't get better until the policies change.