President Joe Biden’s border chief is celebrating his policy of reuniting legally deported migrants with the children they left in the United States — while he hides the number of migrants killed by his pro-migration policies.
“Our mission is to reunite every family that was so cruelly separated,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-born, pro-migration head of the Department of Homeland Security.
We are dedicated to this mission. Today we mark the reunification of more than 600 separated families. But our work is not done. It will not be done until we’ve given every family the opportunity to reunify and to heal the wounds that they have suffered. We are incredibly proud of and committed to this mission.
Today we mark the reunification of more than 600 separated families, but our work is not done. It will not be done until we’ve given every family the opportunity to reunify and to heal the wounds that they have suffered.
Read more: https://t.co/gNJkozOckK pic.twitter.com/yumzDqb0j9
— Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (@SecMayorkas) February 2, 2023
But elsewhere, Mayorkas also admits that many parents and children have died trying to reach the United States during Biden’s first two years in office.
The Cuban-born, pro-migration, border chief has tried to reduce the deaths, in part, to minimize media coverage of his high-migration, low-wage Extraction Migration policy. For example, Mayorkas is now urging more migrants to use his legally questionable — but certainly safer — “parole pathway” to get into U.S. jobs and homes.
“We have seen too much tragedy in the oceans of the Atlantic,” as people use boats to reach the United States from Haiti and Cuba, he told a press conference in Miami, Florida on January 30. “We have seen a loss of life — we’ve seen loved ones lose children and family members,” said Mayorkas,
Mayorkas has yet to provide an estimate of how many migrant children and adults have been killed on his watch.
Mayorkas’s policies have caused far more deaths — and family separations — than the policies established by President Donald Trump. Trump minimized illegal migration by enforcing most of the nation’s popular border laws. For example, Trump deterred migration by quickly deporting illegal migrants, such as the parents of the 600 left-behind children.
Democrats are eager to shame Republicans when migrants are hurt or killed by popular and legal U.S. border protections.
But GOP politicians have been slow to shame Democrats for the very many deaths they cause by opening unpopular and often-illegal pathways for more migrants.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), however, slammed Democrats at a February 1 hearing of the House judiciary committee:
Can you see the uptick in the [death] numbers here? Way up here? That chart reflects the uptick in migrant deaths. That’s 2020 to 2022. Almost 1,000 migrant deaths at the southwest border of the United States. We had 53 migrants die in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio — cooked in the Texas heat. Fifty-seven were killed when a tractor-trailer crammed migrants rolled over in a highway crash in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Ask me this, is it Christian for migrants to die like that?
“Untold thousands” of people have died in the migration caused by Biden’s law border policies, said Todd Bensman, an author and border expert with the Center for Immigration Studies.
I don’t have the data. Nobody does. We know how many died on the U.S. side [of the border] because we find their skeletal remains or their bodies washed up in the rivers. But that’s just a tiny percentage of the ones that died on the way [to the United States] and then we just don’t know. [In the Darien Gap jungle, for example] a flash flood comes in and wipes out 20 or more.
The Miami Herald reported in May 2022:
In the past eight months Haitians have been leaving from the island and nearby coastal areas on the mainland by the hundreds to reach the Keys — the largest exodus of boat refugees since 2004. Most are stopped at sea and sent back to Haiti. Countless others are lost at sea on what have come to be called “invisible shipwrecks,” incidents involving migrant deaths that go unrecorded because no one knows about them …
“Mwen sou voyaj.” “I am on a journey,” said a spirited 25-year-old Haitian man who gave his name only as Peterson, while waiting in La Vallée, one of several villages on Île de la Tortue, to depart. “It’s the biggest risk: Either you die or you succeed.”
Media coverage is difficult when the bodies disappear quietly at sea or in the Darien Gap jungle between South American and Latin America.
“There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com said about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres:
The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the [Panama] jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud.
“He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that,” he said with tears in his eyes.
Migrants, mostly Venezuelans, walk across the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama hoping to reach the U.S. on Saturday, October 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
“The stories we have heard from those who have crossed the Darien Gap attest to the horrors of this journey,” Giuseppe Loprete, the Panama manager for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a January 17 statement. “Many have lost their lives or gone missing, while others come out of it with significant health issues, both physical and mental,” he added.
A group of migrants, mostly Venezuelans, walk across the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama hoping to reach the U.S. on Saturday, October 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
“More than 1,238 lives have been lost during migration in the [north, central and south] Americas in 2021, among them at least 51 children,” said the group’s July 1 report. “At least 728 of these deaths occurred on the United States-Mexico border crossing, making this the deadliest land crossing in the world,” said the IOM statement. The statement added:
“The number of deaths on the United States-Mexico border last year is significantly higher than in any year prior, even before COVID-19,” said Edwin Viales, author of the new IOM report on migrants in the Americas in 2021. “Yet, this number remains an undercount.”
The number of deaths on the United States-Mexico border in 2021 was significantly higher than in any year prior, even before COVID-19.
This year we have already recorded almost 300 fatalities.#EndMigrantDeathshttps://t.co/cFiuuS0DRT
— Missing Migrants Project (@MissingMigrants) July 1, 2022
Mayorkas’ statement ignored the separations-by-death on his watch, but made sure to slam Trump, even though Trump’s emphasis on enforcement prevented myriad deaths:
the Department of Homeland Security and the Task Force it leads has thus far reunited more than 600 children who were separated from their families under the prior administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.
…
We understand that our critical work is not finished. There are 148 children who are currently in the process of being reunited with their families. The Task Force continues to coordinate outreach to families who were separated to ensure they are afforded the opportunity to reunite in the United States and receive critically needed behavioral health services to address the trauma they suffered.
Most of the 600 children cited by Mayorkas are voluntarily separated because they were allowed to stay with home-country relatives while progressive lawyers tried to win legal status for them. Many foreign juveniles do get legal status by claiming their parents abandoned them.
Most employees in the establishment media downplay the many deaths and uncritically praised Mayorkas’s policy of returning legally deported parents to the children they choose to leave behind in the United States.
“Never forget the inhumanity,” tweeted Jim Avila from ABC News.
“Nobody has been held accountable for Trump’s separation policy despite AG Garland saying it was “shameful” during his confirmation process, and that “I can’t imagine anything worse than tearing parents from their children,” said a tweet from Jacob Soboroff at NBC News.
Progressives ignore the death toll, said Bensman:
The liberals who are offended by the bodies just say … “When you [Republicans] put up restrictions and obstacles is when they veer over to the desert and die of thirst … restrictions and laws are killing people.” From my perspective … these restrictions and obstacles save lives.
“It’s all narrative” to them, said Bensman, but Mayorkas and his hard-core allies, he said, believe “You’ve got to break few eggs.”
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