Biden's border crisis claims infant girl found dead in Rio Grande River

AP Photo/Felix Marquez

The Biden border crisis is not just a national security threat. The porous southern border is also a humanitarian crisis. Over the holiday weekend, four people drowned in the Rio Grand River as they tried to cross into Texas.

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Lt. Chris Olivarez, DPS spokesman, tweeted out the news of the tragic discovery. It happened in Eagle Pass, when two airboats were deployed by DPS in response to a possible infant drowning. The Tactical Marine Unit recovered the bodies of the infant and a female adult Saturday and they were unresponsive.

“TMU operators immediately performed chest compressions on the two,” Olivarez tweeted Monday. “Medical staff arrived on the scene and transported both to Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center, where both were pronounced deceased.”

Four people were recovered by state officials floating in the river, including the deceased. Two survivors were released to the Border Patrol.

Two more bodies, one male and one female, were recovered from the river on Sunday and Monday. They have not been identified because they didn’t have identification documents.

Monday DPS troopers found two young children from Guatemala. They were alone in Eagle Pass. They told troopers that a woman left them at the edge of the river in Mexico and told them to cross. They were 8 and 11 years of age.

Human traffickers and drug cartels control sections of the border on the Mexican side. The Rio Grande River is dangerous. Period. Migrants drown trying to enter outside of a legal port of entry. Nine drowned last September. The traffickers don’t care. Apparently, the Biden administration doesn’t care, either.

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Governor Abbott is putting up a buoy barrier in the river to keep migrants from trying to cross. On top of installing razor wire along the border to turn away illegal migrants, the governor is installing the buoys down the river to stop people from crossing. They won’t be able to go underneath the buoys and they won’t be able to get around the buoys.

“What these buoys are going to allow us to do is to prevent people from even getting to the border,” Abbott said.

Those who advocate for the porous border are not pleased with the governor’s actions. they claim that buoy barrier may violate a 1970 treaty with Mexico. International human rights groups call the plan cruel. For example, Amnesty International says the move will injure or kill people who are fleeing poor conditions in their home countries. The purpose of the buoy barrier is to stop the flow of illegal migrants trying to cross the river, though. If they see the buoys and realize there is no getting around them, they will not get in to try and cross. That is the point. Because, as it is now, illegal migrants are dying in their attempts to cross the river. Is that what Amnesty International wants? That’s the status quo.

“It is a monument to cruelty,” said Amy Fischer, the director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.

Border walls and buoy barriers don’t actually stop people fleeing poverty and persecution from coming, she said. It just makes their route more dangerous as they try to exercise their human rights to seek safety.

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It is not the obligation of the United States to make it easier for illegal migrants to enter the country. Joe Biden is doing all he can to help them, we know that, but it is a dereliction of his duty as president. He should be impeached for it, not applauded. Joe Biden’s complete cave to leftists is detrimental to our country’s safety and border security.

In June, DPS Director Steven McCraw said no one is trying to harm anyone. “We don’t want anybody to get hurt,” McCraw said. “In fact, we want to prevent people from drowning. And this is a proactive way.”

The 1970 treaty mentioned is one that manages river accesss.

But deploying floating barriers may infringe on a 1970s treaty with Mexico that manages river access. That pact sets limits on how the two countries can manage the Rio Grande, said Stephen Mumme, a Colorado State University political science professor who is also the author of “Border Water: The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945–2015.″

Mumme said the treaty requires any levees or barriers from El Paso to Brownsville to be signed off by both the U.S. and Mexican governments. A spokesman for the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the treaty, said they have not heard from the Abbott administration.

The IBWC has challenged barriers built too close to the water before. When a private group tried to continue constructing border walls on the river, they were admonished for putting barriers too close to the water where posts could collect debris and deflect water flow that could add to flooding during storms.

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Amnesty International claims it is politicians trying to out-do each other’s cruelty. “It shows a complete disregard for the lives of people who are trying to exercise their human rights to seek safety in the United States,” Fischer said. The problem with that argument is that he conflates the obligation to accept anyone who seeks to enter our country. There are legal ports of entry that are suppoed to be used, not just randomly crossing the river wherever it looks like illegal migrants will do so successfully. We are a nation of laws – or, we used to be – and there is no such obligation to allow our sovereignty as a country to be violated.

It is those organizations that lend encouragement to illegal migration that are the most cruel of people in this humanitarian crisis. They deliver false hope to those looking for it. It’s often a deadly decision.

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John Stossel 8:30 AM | December 22, 2024
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