As if the border crisis isn’t damaging enough, with 2.5 million illegal migrants having crossed into the United States since Joe Biden took office, now the administration is going to make it exponentially worse by unwinding the last Trump-era restriction.
The Title 42 policy, implemented by the Trump administration during the pandemic to allow border officials quickly to expel migrants on public health grounds, will be terminated next month, the CDC announced Friday.
Title 42 was the last tool border officials had left to stem the flow of illegal migration from more than 150 countries across the southern border. Now, they are anticipating a doubling or tripling of numbers to as many as 18,000 a day.
We know what that means. More secret migrant flights fanning out from the southern border to a town near you.
Already, charter flights to White Plains airport in Westchester have started again, after a hiatus following The Post’s report last October revealing migrant planes landing in the middle of the night several times a week, and unloading hundreds of migrants, claimed to be children, to be spirited away on buses to locations around New York and neighboring states.
Unlike before, they now are landing before the airport’s midnight curfew, and there are fewer each week. The planes are stopping en route, in cities like Houston, Texas, and Oklahoma City, Okla., as opposed to Jacksonville, Fla., where The Post observed them last year disgorging migrants.
Publicly available flight data show World Atlantic Airways charter planes began landing again in White Plains in late February.
On February 25, March 11, March 19 and March 21, World Atlantic Airways flights from El Paso flew to White Plains via Houston, arriving between 7.59 p.m. and 9.21 p.m.
On March 4, and March 26 World Atlantic Airways planes flew from El Paso to White Plains via Oklahoma City, arriving at 9:25 p.m. and 9:33 p.m.
It is not known who was on board, but these are the same McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft with the same registration numbers which were chartered by the Department of Health and Human Services and were observed by The Post flying illegal migrant minors into White Plains last year.
It is not just White Plains. Migrant flights from the border are traveling all over the country, as the administration tries to manage the deluge at the border by spreading the problem far and wide, turning every state into a border state.
With the end of Title 42, already record numbers are set to explode.
Even moderate Democrats think the move is insane. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have condemned the plan to nix Title 42.
Manchin described it as “a frightening decision . . . Title 42 has been an essential tool in combatting the spread of COVID-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border.
“We are already facing an unprecedented increase in migrants this year, and that will only get worse if the Administration ends the Title 42 policy. We are nowhere near prepared to deal with that influx.”
Already, since President Biden dismantled Trump-era border restrictions on his first day in office, the number of illegal migrants who have entered the US is the equivalent of the fifth largest city in the nation. By the time the midterms roll around, we will have another 5 million.
That’s at least 7 million total, the equivalent of the second largest city in the country. Almost the size of New York City. It’s like importing the entire population of Libya.
And from next month, that’s the number who will enter every year unless someone wrests control of the border from the cartels.
By the time the next presidential election rolls around, in 2024, the number of Biden illegals will be over 20 million at these rates. That’s a 6% population increase over Biden’s term in illegal migration alone, against a backdrop of rampant inflation.
How do we house and feed such a horde? How do hospitals, schools and jails cope with this unheralded influx with no planning or preparation?
This is Biden’s biggest disaster, and there have been a few.
Throwing Hunter under the bus won’t be enough to clear Joe
Hunter Biden won’t like the interview his father’s chief of staff Ron Klain did with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
Asked about the Delaware investigation into the president’s son’s business affairs, Klain threw Hunter and his uncle Joe Biden under the bus.
“The president is confident that his family did the right thing. But, again, I want to just be really clear, these are actions by Hunter and his brother. They’re private matters. They don’t involve the president. And they certainly are something that no one at the White House is involved in.”
This is the party line, parroted by The Washington Post and CNN in their belated coverage of the story last week.
Sure, they say, it looks bad for Hunter, but, gosh, Joe Biden had nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, this line of defense does not sustain scrutiny.
Judging by morsels trickling out of the ongoing investigation into Hunter, the scope has widened to include questions involving the president.
‘Big Guy’
Witnesses testifying before the Delaware grand jury are believed to have been asked if they know who is the “Big Guy” referred to in coded fashion in e-mails on Hunter’s abandoned laptop and in WhatsApp messages his former business partner Tony Bobulinski handed to the FBI in October 2020.
Bobulinski asserts that the “Big Guy” is Joe Biden.
The identity of the “Big Guy” is relevant because he was to be allocated 10% equity in a joint venture Hunter and partners were cooking up with Chinese company CEFC, according to an e-mail on the laptop.
“Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing,” Bobulinski wrote in a letter to the Post in October 2020. “I’ve seen VP Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.”
There is evidence on the laptop that Joe Biden profited from Hunter’s overseas business dealings, indicating mingled finances, shared bank accounts and household bills Hunter was expected to pay for his father.
Hunter complained about having to give “half” his salary to his father and “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years.”
But even if Klain and media pals want to dismiss evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence-peddling scheme — including meetings with Hunter’s foreign partners — that doesn’t clear the president.
There is no country in the world where millions of dollars paid to a top official’s son for doing nothing would not be regarded as corruption.
“Large payments to the children of powerful government officials by those with interests potentially affected by those officials’ actions are universally understood to be corrupt efforts to influence the officials,” Manhattan litigation lawyer Francis Menton writes in the Manhattan Contrarian blog.
“In cases involving people other than the Bidens, whether the official/parent ‘personally benefited’ from the payments or ‘knew details’ of the transactions are considered completely irrelevant.”
Klain will have to find a better response.