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| Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24. |
Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:
This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance
claimed
that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in
Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started
talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American
media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then
that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...
—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender,
and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie
without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:
Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and
since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually
going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go
on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be
granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That
is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten
years.
The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers
crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just
show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and
waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some
new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for
asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern
Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for
Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from
the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and
days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since
2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a
border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the
only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.
So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of
cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990
Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected
Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and
meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on
the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for
which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting
in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But
in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with
migration at the border at its
lowest level since fall 2020
(when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).
And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to
vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is
as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard.
Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children,
even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.
JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations
thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of
inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to
operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug
mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said
just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out
bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did
exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record
number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running
for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got
religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that
she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed
border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the
border.
Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was
asked in early 2021
to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming
through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El
Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on
US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic
stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by
2023
just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle
countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who
were not part of Harris's mandate).
It's true that
some family separations
took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or
through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the
systematic destruction of families
pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.
Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by
US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can
drive: