Commentary by KVI morning show producer, Phil Vandervort.
The political news website, Axios, is reporting in an exclusive story: “How Biden Botched The Border”.
Let’s consider a few notable parts of the Axios story…
One year ago, in January 2023, President Biden sat with his immigration advisors which included then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O’Malley Dillon, Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and other immigration officials. He demanded obscure immigration data points — and vented when his staff didn’t have them handy.
The previously unreported meeting, recounted to Axios by three people familiar with the events, is emblematic of the Biden administration’s struggle with the border crisis during the past three years — infighting, blame-shifting and indecision.
The rolling chaos along the border has grown to the point that Biden now is embracing immigration policies he ran against in 2020 — such as restricting asylum laws and suggesting he’ll “shut down” the border — as the crisis threatens his re-election.
Many administration leaders treated the issue like a hot potato because it was politically thankless, several sources in and out of government told Axios.
The idea that no one wanted to “own it” came up repeatedly in interviews about the border crisis. But the problem required a robust and coordinated response at several levels of the federal government.
Biden deputized VP Kamala Harris as the Border Czar in March 2021, but, according to Axios… Harris and her office made clear to others in the administration that her responsibilities began and ended with the factors driving people to leave Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the issue Biden had assigned her to examine.
As the migration became more global, Harris’ team remained focused on the Northern Triangle and Mexico.
A former Biden administration senior official told Axios: “She’s been at best ineffective, and at worst sporadically engaged and not seeing it was her responsibility. It’s an opportunity for her, and she didn’t fill the breach.”
According to Axios, warring ideologies inside the White House and the Democratic Party also slowed decision-making
Some officials wanted policies designed to punish or deter people who crossed the border illegally. Others — including vocal immigration advocates outside the administration — pushed to reform asylum policies and expand legal pathways for migrants to stay in the U.S., sources said.
And here’s an important common denominator for the dysfunction in Washington D.C. as well as the dysfunction in Seattle and Olympia politics (and you could add Portland, San Francisco and probably Los Angeles to this list, too).
For me, this phrase “vocal (immigration) advocates outside the administration”, is intrinsic to the failures of the Biden Administration at the border. These same “vocal advocates” are culpable, in my view, for the political dysfunction across Seattle, King County and state government in Olympia.
Examples: the vocal but small “defund police” and “stop the sweeps” activists in Seattle and Olympia. Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles all ail from this same political malady. Like the Biden Administration on the border, the “vocal advocates outside the administration” have warped the political discourse and eventually produced policy responses that are based strictly in ideology, not in viable solutions.
It’s given us paralysis at the US/Mexico border. It’s given us local paralysis on fixing the homeless mess. The costs are both socially and fiscally devastating for these national and local examples. The border crisis creates a massive workload of refugee/asylee cases for our unprepared court system to handle. As the Axios article stated above, the border crisis has spiraled far beyond just a Northern Triangle migration to America–it now involves people from Africa, South America and Asia either seeking refugee status or simply willing to risk a run across the U.S./Mexico border.
Cities like New York, Chicago, Denver and Seattle are all impacted by the unfunded mandates that the border crisis has created. The border crisis has fueled the fentanyl crisis which is racking states like Washington with record setting drug over-doses and deaths.
The same goes locally for the paralysis in responding to the drug-addicted homelessness crisis and the attendant repeat crime problems that are inextricable linked.
The “vocal advocates outside the administration” for Pres. Biden, Gov. Jay Inslee, the King County Executive and Seattle mayor(s) are the activists who are causing far more harm than help among these quality-of-life issues for America, Washington and Puget Sound. Those activists are small in number but loud and belligerent. They are not representative of a larger, broader electorate in Seattle, in King County or in Washington. Those activists need to be ignored by political leadership so we can get to real solutions that work rather than indecision and delay which only causes us to waste lives, waste money and diminish public trust in government.
–Phil Vandervort is the producer of The Commute With Carlson heard weekday mornings from 6am-9am on Talk Radio 570 KVI and he speaks for nobody but himself.
