Within hours of the news that more than 50 migrants had died in the back of a tractor-trailer near San Antonio on Monday, the men, women and children having been baked alive in the blistering Texas heat, anti-immigrant Republicans quickly descended into blaming President Joe Biden. Not because he had anything directly to do with this disaster, this act of mass torture, this surreal tragedy; this was clearly the work of human traffickers taking advantage of desperate people willing to risk everything for a new life in the United States. The finger-pointing also wasn’t because the president lacked compassion for those trying to circumvent restrictive border policies; quite the contrary: He had demonstrated too much.
In the eyes of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Biden is at fault because he’s too soft on the Southern border. His walls aren’t long enough, his border guards not numerous or aggressive enough, his detention facilities not overcrowded or inhumane enough, his unwillingness to treat asylum-seekers as chattel a sign of weakness instead of what it is — an act of civility and kindness.
“These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott pronounced on Twitter before any bodies could be buried or, in many cases, even identified. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”
