Obama Wants $3.7B for Border he Said Was Secure in 2012

 

IBDEditorials.com

Immigration: During his re-election campaign, President Obama said emphatically that the southwestern border was secure. Now he wants billions to cope with the flood of illegals crossing that very border.

According to various news accounts, the number of illegals coming across the border has surged to 35,000 month. In just the past few months, more than 50,000 unaccompanied children crossed over, creating a huge humanitarian crisis.

How can this possibly be happening?

After all, didn't Obama tell us when he ran for re-election that the border with Mexico was secure?

As a matter of fact, he did. Many times. In a 2011 speech in El Paso, Obama ripped Republicans for holding up immigration legislation because of border security concerns.

"Over the past two years we have answered those concerns," he said. "We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible."

"The Border Patrol has 20,000 agents — more than twice as many as there were in 2004," he said, adding that the border "fence is now basically complete."

A year later, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told lawmakers: "Simply put, the Obama administration has undertaken the most serious and sustained actions to secure the Southwest border in our nation's history."

And this is to say nothing of Obama's 2008 campaign promise to secure the border using "additional personnel, infrastructure and technology."

Well, Obama got the spending hikes. The U.S. Border Patrol reports that its budget was $3.5 billion last year—a 54% increase since he took office.

The number of border agents is up 22% under Obama, and it is double the level from a decade ago.

As to the border being secure, the flood of immigrants marching seemingly unimpeded into America makes a mockery of that claim.

Now Obama wants billions more to fix a crisis that would have never happened had he been telling the truth two years ago.

Even here, Obama isn't being serious, or honest.

More likely, he's trying to use this crisis as a way to pad agency budgets.

Why else would Obama want more money for the Health and Human Services, Justice and State departments ($2.2 billion in total) than he's asking for border security and immigration enforcement (just $433 million and $1.1 billion, respectively) while backing off any promise to get tougher on deportations?

Not that more money will matter.

Does anyone believe that an additional $433 million for the Border Patrol will make any difference, when the $1.2 billion raise that Obama gave it didn't?

Rarely has there been a public policy failure as grand or as tragic as the one unfolding on America's southern border, or a leader who is so clearly to blame.

Taxpayers should hold Obama accountable for encouraging this mushrooming disaster and doing so little to stop it — and for all the money he wasted and false claims he made about border security to get himself re-elected.