The border crisis isn’t just a red-state issue anymore

As I’ve noted before, the border crisis has spiraled out of control under Joe Biden’s presidency, with border states like Texas and Arizona seeing record numbers of illegal immigrants pour over the southern border and into our country and the Biden administration doing precious little to stop it. 

Because of the federal government’s woeful inaction, not to mention Vice President Kamala “border czar” Harris’ numerous leadership failures on the issue, some states that regularly see influxes of illegal immigrants, like Texas and Florida, started bussing some of them to so-called “sanctuary” cities like Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. back in 2022 and continue to do so. 

The purpose is twofold. 

For starters, it is to give the Democrat mayors in those cities a little taste of what it’s like since they, like Joe Biden, are open-border types who haven’t had to worry about their cities being overrun and resources being depleted by the surges like border cities have. 

But most importantly, it is to send a signal to Joe Biden that it is time for this to stop being primarily a red-state problem and for him to start paying attention to it since the mayors in these cities are Democrats to whom he presumably will actually pay attention. 

Those Democrat mayors are now raising the roof, with New York City’s Eric Adams and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson openly pleading with President Biden to help them alleviate the crisis, in between their grumblings about how Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are meanies for sending them there. 

Biden’s approval numbers on illegal immigration have never been good but the national attention being brought to the issue now because Democrat-run cities are being impacted has caused them to drop even more, with one recent poll showing a dismal 26 percent approval rating. 

Another showed an overwhelming majority trusted Congressional Republicans over Democrats to handle the border crisis, with key Democrat voting blocs comfortably putting Republicans over Democrats by double digits on the issue. 

Biden’s response to all of this has been to blame the mainstream media, which is pretty astonishing when one considers all the ways they’ve tried to cover for Biden over the three years of his presidency so far. 

Amazingly, not even CNN is buying it, with a panel of reporters including two of the network’s anchors agreeing in a Thursday segment on the border crisis that the bussing strategy “has worked from a political perspective,” forcing the Biden administration to reportedly be making concession after concession in negotiations with House and Senate Republicans on border security. 

Though the number of concessions Biden will make remains to be seen, rest assured that he likely wouldn’t be contemplating them at all had Abbott and DeSantis not called his bluff. 

“President Biden has dissolved the southern border,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) noted during a Fox News interview last week. “Our problems at the southern border are man-made, and that man’s name is Joe Biden, and the people of Louisiana and the American people know it.” 

As the old saying goes, truer words have never been spoken. 

Joe Biden is polling poorly on several fronts, with the economy and inflation being at the top of the list as 2024 roars to life. But ultimately he may find out that the border crisis ends up being his Achilles heel in November, with fed-up voters, even a sizable number of Democrats in blue cities and states heading to the ballot box and saying “Enough is enough.” 

North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.