With Trump, Kansas’ Roger Marshall found conditions on the border OK. Not now, though
Let’s check in with Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, our tour guide for a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border over the weekend.
“There is nothing humane about what we have going on right now at our southern border,” he tells us in a video shot in a helicopter, above the Rio Grande valley. The video includes pictures of what appear to be immigrants trying to cross the river.
Later, on the ground: “This is a crisis on the border. … It is absolutely a national security crisis.”
There is no question the influx of immigrants and refugees from Latin America, many of them children, remains a major national concern. President Joe Biden, like his predecessors, must confront the difficulty of dealing humanely and quickly with thousands of people risking their lives to come to America.
But Marshall’s visit over the weekend was a publicity stunt, aimed at exploiting the crisis for political and personal reasons.
How do we know this? Let’s start with the social media videos, which are glorified selfies. Follow that with scheduled appearances Monday on Fox News radio and Newsmax, two conservative news outlets.
“We got here because of President Biden’s policies,” Marshall said on Newsmax, affronting the truth.
Marshall does not sit on any Senate committees primarily involved in immigration. That’s another tip-off that his travelogue had no firm policy motive.
He claims immigrants are bringing in COVID-19, which even Republicans reject.
Mostly, though, Marshall’s intentions become clear when you study what he said two years ago after traveling to the border as a member of the House.
Donald Trump, a Republican, was president then. Democrats were critical of the administration’s response to a border surge, and the incarceration of immigrant children in cages.
Marshall was unperturbed. One shelter was “good,” he said then, and the other was “adequate with lots of room for improvement.”
“They have showers, put them all through medical assessment,” Marshall said. “We’re trying.”
Back then, he blamed Democrats for “theatrics and screaming” at Border Patrol agents. He defended Trump’s planned border wall, which Mexico was supposed to pay for.
When a Republican is president, immigration complaints are theatrics. When a Democrat is in the White House, they show a humanitarian crisis.
Biden has told the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help set up facilities to handle the rush of immigrants, and Congress this week may take up parts of an immigration reform plan. Both are welcome developments.
But the nation will be plagued by these problems until it takes up the real immigration reform that Republicans used to say they were all for. Among other things, the U.S. has to build better intake facilities on the border, and hire enough workers to ensure the health and safety of those who come here.
That’s where Sen. Marshall might actually be helpful. Instead of whining about Trump’s unfinished border wall, he could argue for spending what’s needed to respond to the immigration we desperately need.
He could support additional help for Central American countries in an effort to stop the violence that forces kids to leave their homes.
He could emulate former Sens. Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, who supported Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for immigrants as part of an overall immigration measure in 1986.
Instead, he’s taken us on a self-serving helicopter tour of a tragedy.