The governors of several border states are “asking for tighter border enforcement to keep their communities safe,” amid the coronavirus crisis, reports the Washington Post.
“The situation is very bad in Texas and [cross-border travel] would only bring us problems in northern Tamaulipas,” said Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, the governor of Tamaulipas. (You probably thought it was U.S. border state governors calling for tighter border control. LOL!) Garcia Cabeza de Vaca’s sentiments were echoed by Sonora’s health minister, Enrique Clausen who warned, “It’s so important to implement the necessary measures to protect the health of Sonorans. And one of them, at this moment, has to be reducing the border crossings from the United States toward Mexico.”
In response these efforts by high ranking Mexican government officials to stop the flow of Americans entering Mexico, the broad and massively-funded coalition of American open borders advocacy groups had this to say: “Zzzzzzzzzz.” The ACLU is expected to file a lawsuit to stop this blatant profiling of Americans within 48 hours of Hell freezing over.
The calls by Mexican state officials to halt the flow of Americans heading south, however, has not stopped other Mexican officials from demanding that the U.S. cease deportations.
“Why are they continuing these deportations in the middle of a deadly pandemic, including people who are already sick and who knows how many asymptomatic people?” Maki Ortiz, the mayor of the Mexican city Reynosa, demanded to know in May.
On the matter of sending people crossing into the United States illegally during a health crisis, the open borders advocacy did register a strongly held opinion. “We call on the Trump Administration to immediately rescind its policy of shutting the border to individuals seeking asylum, halt all deportations, and release immigrants currently in detention,” a coalition of 60 advocacy groups stated in an April letter outlining their demands to keep the northbound flow of migrants wide open.
The Mexican officials calling for restrictions on people entering their country is, of course, perfectly legitimate given the surging number of COVID-19 cases in Texas, Arizona and California. Protecting public health and safety should be their top priority. Oddly, however, that logic does not seem to apply in reverse. Efforts by the U.S. federal government or by state officials to discourage people from crossing our borders in order to protect public health and safety are universally greeted with moral outrage and lawsuits. Of course, a lot of things don’t make sense these days.
