What would be the absolutely last thing to add to a state devastated by natural disasters, where people are literally struggling just to survive? More people. Yet that is exactly what the Biden Administration has chosen to unleash on Texas in the midst of a once-in-a-century deep freeze and the near-collapse of the state’s power grid.
The scale of what Texas has already endured in the wake of winter storms and record cold temperatures since February 13 is truly catastrophic and hard to overstate. At the peak of the crisis, upwards of three million people lost power and were unable heat their homes in the frigid cold. Simply getting food and water was difficult in many places, with as many as seven million people under orders to boil their water which was impossible to do at times because of power outages and mile-long lines at grocery stores with empty shelves. At least 60 people died.
While Texans worked to overcome these challenges, the Biden administration added complications with the addition of thousands of illegal aliens.
The Biden administration has piled one reckless immigration policy after another with the stroke of a pen: halting most deportations, reviving catch-and-release, letting currently detained aliens out of custody, stopping any new construction on the border wall, bringing thousands of asylum applicants back into the country who previously had to wait in Mexico for their claims to be decided, and ending “safe third country” agreements with the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, just for starters. The policies opened the flood gates of people flowing into Texas now, and even more will likely be drawn by the magnet of non-enforcement of our immigration laws. And, in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of these individuals haven’t been tested for the virus.
How are all these new people just showing up in already devastated communities supposed be provided for? How are they supposed to be fed when store shelves are empty? How are they supposed to get clean drinking water when some Texas families have already had to resort to bringing in ice and snow from outside to melt lest they die of thirst? How much more strain will they put on hospitals and other health care resources, whether from COVID-19 or simply the health consequences of cold, hunger or thirst?
This is no partisan game. It’s a matter Texans needing to conserve their own resources just to stay alive from one day to the next. State Senator Juan Hinojosa (D-McAllen) has called the prospect of thousands of new arrivals in the middle of such an immense preexisting disaster “very alarming” while the Democratic Mayor of Del Rio, Bruno Lozano, has been outspoken in pleading with the administration to stop all these plans, saying “[i]f you do send these individuals into our community, we will be forced to make a decision to leave them without resources under these dire circumstances,” and adding “[w]e may be a small town that is off of your radar, but we are a community of 50,000 people who need your attention.”
The thaw will come and damaged power and water supplies will be repaired. But the chaos that Del Rio and many other communities along the border and in the interior of the country will continue to struggle with the political and humanitarians disasters that are the predictable consequences of Biden’s non-enforcement policies.