Now that America’s experiment of permissiveness toward illegal immigration has metastasized into an existential crisis for the nation, it seems almost everyone in our ruling class is now claiming to be a longtime proponent of stricter border security. This is, of course, a cynical masquerade to confuse the public and avoid responsibility for their role in creating the problem.
Of all the recent attempts at border hawk reinvention, few are more shameless than that of former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Most residents of the Big Apple who lived through his nightmarish eight-year mayoralty probably hoped de Blasio would be too ashamed to remain in the public eye, and instead live out of the rest of his days in self-imposed exile.
Unfortunately, an unrepentant de Blasio surfaced recently to opine on the border crisis for unhinged leftist cable news channel MSNBC. It was one of the more outrageous attempts at gaslighting and historical revisionism, even by the standards of our current truth-challenged political environment.
The main cause of our problems with illegal immigration, according to Hizzoner, is that the state of Texas bussed illegal aliens to cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
“We have no proof this has discouraged undocumented individuals from crossing the border,” he wrote. “Meanwhile tens of thousands more migrants continue to make the perilous journey.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s purpose in sending the buses north was never to discourage foreign nationals from entering the country illegally; it was to shame and pressure mayors like de Blasio to feel the consequences of the absurd and irresponsible sanctuary policies they promote.
These sanctimonious mayors cared little for the plight Texas and other border states when they were absorbing millions of illegal aliens and all the burdens that come with them. Only when the mayors were forced to take on a few thousand aliens did they start to realize the Biden administration’s border policy is unsustainable.
“The actions of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have hurt my beloved city by radically overtaxing our municipal resources and undermining our ability to serve the almost 9 million people already living here,” wrote de Blasio. That is rich, considering that de Blasio spent his eight years as mayor defending sanctuary policies and drawing more illegal aliens to the city. He and other sanctuary mayors never specified the limit for how many aliens their cities would accept. Instead they proclaimed Immigrants Make Us Stronger™ and basked in the praise for their superior morality while never being put to the test until Abbott began sharing that “strength.”
The former mayor also apparently expects most people to forget the macabre details of life in New York on his watch. DeBlasio, after inheriting a relatively safe Gotham after the Guiliani and Bloomberg administrations, oversaw a significant crime spike.
In 2021 Reeaz Khan, an illegal alien from Guyana, was arrested in Queens and charged with the brutal sexual assault and murder of Maria Fuentes, 92, a beloved member of her community and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. He had been arrested in New York the previous year for assaulting his father and for criminal possession of a weapon. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents filed a request to detain Khan so they could take him into their custody for possible deportation, the New York Police Department followed the city’s sanctuary policy and denied the request. Khan was instead released back into the general public, where he remained until his arrest for murder. He is now serving a 22-years-to-life sentence.
Amid the firestorm of criticism over Fuentes’ murder, de Blasio defended the sanctuary policy and his position that only after illegal aliens have been convicted of committing “heinous” crimes should they be jailed and possibly deported. So an innocent victim had to die a violent death before New York City would support the deportation of an illegal alien with a prior record of violent behavior.
Under de Blasio’s watch, New York was named “America’s Most Dangerous Sanctuary Community.”
And all this took place long before Greg Abbott ever sent a bus to Manhattan.
The sudden call by liberals for tighter border security is really about pushing dead-on-arrival legislation through Congress that critics say would actually make the border crisis worse. Sanctuary mayors and their ilk will never see the error of their ways and change course. They will only try to fool the public with bait-and-switch laws that create the illusion of enhanced border enforcement while further speeding America’s decline.
Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.