Democrats are no longer embracing their previously held position that the ongoing situation at the southern border is a “manufactured crisis” and are now preparing to pass a sizable aid package to address what they admit is a “humanitarian crisis.”
House Democrats are on board with a $4.5 billion aid package to confront the festering problems on the southern border and Central America, the Hill reports.
This is a rapid reversal from Democrat leadership’s previous position. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accused President Trump of “fear-mongering” and “manufacturing a crisis at the border” following his State of the Union Address earlier this year.
“Instead of fear-mongering and manufacturing a crisis at the border, President Trump should commit to signing the bipartisan conference committee’s bill to keep government open and provide strong, smart border security solutions,” Pelosi said at the time.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who issued the Democrat rebuttal along with the speaker, also accused Trump of using fear to manufacture a crisis.
“Most presidents have used Oval Office addresses for noble purposes,” Schumer stated. “This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear, and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.”
They were not the only Democrats to deny reality. Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released a video statement at the time and addressed Trump directly.
“Mr. President, we don’t need to create artificial crises. We have enough real ones,” he said.
Democrat denial did not make the crisis go away. Over 132,000 apprehensions were made in May, making it a “two-decade record high for illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border in May.”
Breitbart News reported:
Not since May 2000 has the country seen this level of illegal immigration heading into the summer. In May 2000, more than 166,000 border apprehensions were made at the southern border. Clinton was president at the time.
Illegal immigration last month was more than nine times the level of May 2017 and more than three times the level of May 2018 illegal immigration totals.
This month, Prince Policy Advisors researcher Steven Kopits projects that illegal immigration at the southern border will still cross over to more than 100,000 border apprehensions.
Mark Morgan, who served as a Border Patrol chief during the Obama years, told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo in April that this is a “crisis like we’ve never experienced in the history of this country since we started tracking numbers.”
As Breitbart News reported last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 140 illegal aliens as part of a five-day raid across multiple states – Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Almost one-third of those arrested had criminal records.
Additionally, illegal aliens are reportedly being released into the United States, forgoing basic health examinations. Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan wrote a testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June, which read in part:
The public health risk — family units are released into our communities with unknown vaccination status and without a standard medical examination for communicable diseases of public health concern, as well as a public health risk of disease outbreak at processing facilities.
Most recently, ICE had to quarantine over 5,000 migrant detainees for exposure to mumps and chicken pox.
“The quarantine stretches across many of the 39 immigrant detention centers, where many await their deportation hearings,” Breitbart News reported.
With those developments – along with many others – brewing, Pelosi swiftly reversed her position and denied downplaying the crisis in the first place.
“Well, let me just say this. We’ve never not said that there was a crisis — there is a humanitarian crisis at the border, and some of it provoked by the actions taken by the administration,” Pelosi told a reporter during a weekly press conference in May.
“What is happening at the border is tragic and we hope to address some of that in the disaster supplemental,” she continued. “And we understand our responsibility to secure our border.”
The left’s rhetoric on the border crisis has flipped dramatically over the last few months, weeks, and days. Most recently, freshman Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) compared migrant detention facilities to concentration camps and invoked the well-known Holocaust remembrance phrase “Never Again.”