Gavin Newsom Visits Southern Border, Blames Republicans for Crisis

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Monday and blamed Republicans for the ongoing crisis there, despite the fact that the ongoing influx is a reaction to President Joe Biden’s policies.

Millions of migrants have poured across the border since Biden was elected president, many of them traveling from around the world to take advantage of the Democrats’ deliberately lax policies. Earlier this week, 1,000 migrants crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso in one night, an unprecedented number.

Biden, who told migrants to “surge” to the border during his campaign in 2019, halted President Donald Trump’s border wall project upon taking office, and dropped almost all of Trump’s enforcement policies, including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required supposed asylum-seekers to stay outside the U.S. until their cases could be adjudicated.

The only remaining enforcement policy is Title 42, which allows the U.S. to keep migrants out for public health reasons relating to the pandemic. The Biden administration is ambivalent about the policy, seeking to end it but wary of the surge that will result — and that is, in fact, already happening in anticipation of the policy change.

Newsom visited a California facility in Imperial County that provides services to migrants. He blasted the federal government — which is currently run entirely by his own party — for failing to provide more funding. (Amid a general spending spree, the border crisis one of the only things that Democrats have shown little interest in spending money to address.) Newsom said the state cannot continue to fund the services alone.

He then blamed Republicans and conservative pundits for the problem, saying they had “politicized” migration.

“Everyone needs to get off their ideological perch and start dealing with the reality in a comprehensive manner,” Newsom said. He criticized the GOP and conservative news pundits for exploiting immigration as strictly a border security issue and ignoring the need for sweeping reform.

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