Illegal aliens, brimming with a sense of entitlement, have gotten aggressive lately.

On March 13, thousands pushed their way through barriers into El Paso, demanding asylum in the U.S. and saying the Joe Biden app for applying for asylum was too jammed to work, while the prospect of literally waiting in line was too much to ask.  "Open the doors to your country," the migrants shouted, not in English, of course.

This attitude issue comes as a new border surge is on its way.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 49,291 migrants have crossed into the Darien Gap in southern Panama from Colombia in the first two months of the year, braving snakes, poison frogs, jaguars, mud, pirates, criminals, angry Indian tribes, and drug cartels to make their way north to the U.S. That's more than five times as many as the 8,964 who crossed last year. Most who survive will be single, military-aged young men.

And those are far from the only ones on their way here. Many are coming in from the northern border, others are coming in by boats, some are getting in through Alaska, and many more are using Mexico as a transit country, avoiding the dangerous Darien Gap.

As for the border itself, the Wall Street Journal reports that it's now become a zone of death:

EAGLE PASS, Texas—Local officials keep a refrigerated truck to hold the bodies of migrants who drown in the currents of the Rio Grande while trying to cross the border into the U.S.

Across the river, families having picnics or walking along the waterfront promenade of Piedras Negras, Mexico, say they sometimes see bodies floating by or bobbing among the reeds under a bridge. “We had times when we received four or five bodies a week,” said Hugo González, owner of Funerarias González in Piedras Negras. “At one point, there were a lot of corpses and there was nowhere to put them. We just didn’t have enough refrigerators at the funeral home.”

A spike in deaths along the most dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border reflects the escalating number of migrants seeking to cross into the U.S. from troubled home countries. At the same time, U.S. immigration policies are allowing fewer of them legal entry. Many migrants have turned to human smugglers and WhatsApp messages to help them navigate more lightly patrolled—and treacherous—sections of the border to enter illegally, U.S. officials said. 

 

The bodies of more than 890 migrants, a record number, were recovered by U.S. authorities along the border in the 2022 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the Biden administration, a 58% increase over 2021. They drowned in fast-moving sections of the Rio Grande or, after successfully crossing, died falling from cliffs along mountain passes or from dehydration while lost, said U.S. border agents and police who recover the bodies. Hundreds more were reported missing.

Obviously, Joe Biden's claim that illegal border crossings have fallen sharply was another of his gaslights.

The mixed messages that Biden is sending to migrants is fueling a late surge of illegal border crossers that won't let up any time soon.

On the one hand, he's laid out easy-peasy asylum policies -- all an illegal border crosser has to do is to get into the U.S., for free, is to say the magic word "asylum," and he'll be let in for as long as it takes for an immigration court to adjudicate his case. He can also look forward to nobody looking to deport him in a few years if the court rejects his case, because the Biden administration isn't bothering with "longtime residents," claiming that it has bigger priorities.

On the other hand, Biden is starting to create the appearance of clamping down on illegal border crossings as the 2024 election approaches.

In January, Biden announced this:

“My message is this,” he said. “If you’re trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua or Haiti, or have agreed to begin a journey to America, do not, do not just show up at the border.”

In a concession designed to offset the humanitarian impact of the new restrictions, Mr. Biden said that as many as 30,000 people per month from the four countries would be given the chance to migrate legally to the United States if they have the means to afford a plane ticket, get a sponsor, download an app, pass a background check and meet other requirements.

 And the Haitian migrant response?

Haitians make up the biggest group that has embarked on the dangerous trek that can last four or five days through thick rainforest infested with poisonous snakes and cocaine-trafficking gangs. In January and February, 16,744 Haitians crossed the Darien Gap, up from 1,101 in the year-earlier period, according to the immigration data.

Haitians have been fleeing their impoverished Caribbean nation, which has been battered by growing violence and social unrest since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Haitians who moved to South American countries such as Brazil and Chile in recent years have also been heading north.

Seems they know enough about Joe Biden to ignore what he commands.

Country-shoppers in search of the best value, multi-state border crossers, people who have already been granted asylum elsewhere, people with every intention of flying back and forth from the U.S. to the country they supposedly fled in terror, based on their asylum claims, people who wave the flag of the country they are desperate not to be sent back to, are among the Haitians who have surged in response to Joe's self-vaunted migrant solution. You can bet there are similar dynamics among the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban border crossers in the same Biden program.

At Biden's State of the Union, he claimed his "solution" was working:

We’ve launched a new border plan last month. Unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela has come down 97 percent as a consequence of that.

And according to the Dallas Morning News, Biden's minions insisted:

The Biden administration says the latest data highlight that expanding lawful, orderly pathways to enter the United States results in fewer people risking their lives to sneak into the country illegally.

But the other facts and data tell a different story. Instead of fewer migrants based on Biden's 30,000 asylum-seekers through the app plan, it's exponentially ... more.

According to ABC News, the numbers look like this:

Agents detained migrants more than 2.5 million times at the southern border in 2022, including more than 250,000 in December, the highest on record. According to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, Border Patrol agents stopped migrants about 130,000 times in February, similar to January.

So much for near-zero crossings, as Joe Biden claimed.

In addition, the Border Patrol chief says the situation is out of control.

Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee are looking to turn up the heat on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the wake of bombshell testimony from Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz that the chairman of the committee described as "earth-shattering."

Ortiz had been the main witness at the committee’s field hearing in McAllen, Texas, on Wednesday and had bucked the administration on a number of issues. Ortiz told lawmakers that he disagreed with President Biden’s call to stop wall construction, said there were policies in place that were holding agents back from doing their job, and backed agents who had falsely been accused of whipping Haitian migrants.

But the takeaway from lawmakers was Ortiz’s statement that the U.S. does not have operational control of the border – a statement that contradicted what Mayorkas told lawmakers last year – and that multiple sectors were overwhelmed by the historic migrant flows being encountered.

"In five of those nine southwest border sectors, we have seen an increase in flow and that has caused a considerable strain on our resources and really has forced the Border Patrol to move so agents and even migrants to some of the other areas," he said in response to a question about whether the border is secure.

It may well be that migrants are reading that Biden's easy-entry border policies are about to end and the drawbridge is going up soon, which would explain why so many are coming now in order to get in while they can. That's a natural trigger for a surge.

But wait -- the Biden message to migrants is even further mixed by his other inchoate plans. 

According to the Washington Post:

The administration is also bracing for a potential migration surge after May 11, the date it has set for the expiration of pandemic-related health restrictions along the border.

Migrants are not stupid. They know that when the gates open again, they'd better be near the front of the pack for any chance to bust their way in. It may well be that the 49,000 heading up from the Darien Gap are coming because they know that Biden will soon open the gates again by ending Title 42 come May and they don't want to wait for the next bid to shut that pathway down.

Biden's proposal to deny the right to apply for asylum to applicants who have crossed multiple borders to get to the U.S., instead of fled to the first safe country of refuge, the way real refugees do, is apparently still just a proposal, a sop to win over border state voters perhaps, without it ever going beyond being a proposal.

That may be Biden's plan all along -- make a tough border proposal that won't be followed through on -- solely to ensure the "optics."

A former Obama official, Dan Restrepo, who's been wrong about everything in the past, claimed that open borders weren't the problem at all, just the public relations:

Dan Restrepo, a top White House adviser on Latin America during Barack Obama’s presidency, believes the American public will accept high levels of immigration — if a systematic process can be followed.

The challenge in managing migration “is the sense of chaos and disorder that can be created by images of overwhelmed processing facilities and the like at the physical border,” he said. “It’s less the numbers and more the imagery” that bothers voters.

Pull down the shades and pretend the train is moving, as the old Brezhnev joke goes. Pay lip service to border security, and by actions, get the word out to migrants that the border's open. That's how Biden has created the makings of what may be the biggest border surge of all. It's coming, it's costly and Joe Biden is the one behind it.

Image: Screen shot from CNN/Reuters video, via YouTube