You Know It’s Bad When the President of Mexico is Telling You to Cool It

The surge of migrants heading to the U.S. border has gotten so overwhelming that the president has finally called for measures to get it under control. Not the president of the United States – rather it is Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who is alarmed at the chaos playing out on the border between his country and ours.

“We need to work together to regulate the flow, because this business can’t be tackled from one day to the next,” Lopez Obrador urged. Not only is President Biden’s near total gutting of U.S. immigration enforcement wreaking havoc on our side of the border, but it is also emboldening criminal cartels in Mexico and endangering the lives, health and safety of people in his country.

“They see [Biden] as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” Lopez Obrador cautioned. For migrants, that means a free pass into the United States and for the criminal cartels that move migrants from all across the globe through Mexico to reach the United States, it means huge profits. For Lopez Obrador, richer and more powerful criminal cartels are a threat to the government’s control of the country, and for ordinary Mexican citizens who might get in the way it could mean far worse.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Biden administration insists that there is no crisis – rather a “challenge” that they have “made significant progress” addressing. On Wednesday, President Biden sent his Southern Border Coordinator Roberta Jacobson out to answer questions from the media (because he won’t answer them himself), who continued to insist that what is going on is no big deal. Don’t believe your eyes, or even the alarming data about the number of people (many of them unaccompanied children) crossing the border. “Perception is not the same as reality,” Jacobson insisted, as though all of those people and overflowing detention facilities were mere figments of our imagination.

Of course, Lopez Obrador is not the only one raising alarm about the situation at the border. Local officials in the border regions of Texas – many of whom are Democrats – are not only alarmed, but pointing fingers directly at the White House for creating not a “challenge,” but a full-blown crisis that they simply cannot manage, and pleading with President Biden to stop it.

Whether the Biden administration is in denial, or they just plain don’t care, when the president of Mexico and elected officials of your own party are telling you to cool it, perhaps it is time to start listening.