The September 12–24 migrant camp crisis in Del Rio displayed two lessons very much worth unpacking from the White House response.
By Todd Bensman, The Federalist, Sept. 30, 2021
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
DEL RIO, Texas — The migrant encampment under the international bridge here is liquidated, the 15,000 mostly Haitian illegal migrants who had pooled under it gone to different futures (most paroled into the United States but others flown to Haiti). Bulldozers have erased all trace evidence that anything of much note ever happened here.
Except that much of note did happen during the September 12–24 migrant camp crisis in Del Rio, including two lessons very much worth unpacking from the White House response, which saw this as a political canker sore and therefore swiftly ended it. If retained and refined, these two moves hold the power to prevent a recurrence of new such camps but, perhaps more importantly, to douse the far wider mass migration crisis from which this one spawned. …