Wash Post: Biden Border 'Failure Is Measurable, Politically Toxic'

The Biden administration's "convoluted messaging" on the border crisis "has been a failure" and could lead to losses for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, The Washington Post's editorial board wrote Sunday.

"In its apparent desperation to fashion an immigration strategy that will impose order on increasingly out-of-control migration, the Biden administration has unleashed a torrent of words and goals untethered to specific policies and timetables," the board wrote. "Officials have effectively reversed and rolled back some of the Trump administration's most pernicious policies, but without a clear road map to address the immediate crisis."

The writers also knocked Vice President Kamala Harris for her pointing out the five "pillars," or problem areas in Central America, the federal government needs to focus on.

"That's fine as far as it goes," the board wrote. "It's also a list that anyone with a passing knowledge of the region could have compiled.

"What is mostly missing from the sweeping rhetoric and broad-strokes analysis is an actual plan for action."

Additionally, the "convoluted messaging – telling migrants not to seek entry to the United States, while at the same time relaxing or scrapping an array of measures that would actually dissuade them, and providing relief to migrants on both sides of the border – has been a failure," the board continued.

"That failure is measurable, and it is politically toxic."

Twenty House Republicans on Monday demanded answers from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the Biden administration's handling of the crisis after more than 188,000 migrant encounters were recorded at the border in June and 210,000 in July.

"These numbers are appalling and are a direct result of the Biden administration's weak border policies and your lackluster performance as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security," the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

"DHS's mission is 'with honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland and our values.' Frankly, you are not fulfilling that mission," they wrote.

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