By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-11-20 19:35:33 | Updated at 2024-11-23 08:12:14
2 days ago
After two Jordanian illegal aliens were charged with trying to ram their truck into Marine Corps Base Quantico this summer, Republican lawmakers and the governor of Virginia fired off six letters to senior Biden cabinet members demanding information about the incident.
All that mail went unanswered.
Likewise ignored were any requests for information about a major FBI counterterrorism sting that resulted in the arrests of eight Tajik border-crossers on suspicions of bomb-making.
These examples of willful suppression are emblematic of a greater pattern in how the Biden administration sought to hide from public view everything it could about the worst mass migration border crisis in American history, which has flooded the nation with at least 10 million foreign nationals.
Which is why, as Donald Trump takes the presidency and Republicans control both houses of Congress, a bipartisan national congressional commission is acutely needed to answer the questions the Biden administration won’t.
Throughout the nearly four years of the crisis, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, their staff, media outlets and prominent partisan pundits systematically denied that anything was amiss at the border.
“Nothing has changed. It happens every single year,” Biden lied to reporters at a March 25, 2021, press conference by which time all-time national crossing records had just been broken. “It’s a seasonal thing … earthquakes, floods … lack of food. It’s because of gang violence and because of a whole range of things.”
It was a refrain that he repeated over and over again, even as Americans could see with their own eyes that nothing was normal.
The administration systematically shut down efforts to wring from it real data and information by sitting on countless Freedom of Information Act requests from media and think tanks.
Consider how the administration treated the Center for Immigration Studies, where I work.
Since June 2023, the center submitted nearly 200 freedom of information requests regarding immigration issues. Almost all of them went unanswered.
The group was forced to file lawsuits for 25 of them. Another 35 were administratively appealed for legally questionable agency responses.
And 35 more unfulfilled requests, submitted more than a year ago, would be in litigation now but for bandwidth to do so, said Colin Farnsworth, the center’s chief FOIA counsel.
Many other organizations no doubt experienced similar stiff-arming, leaving Americans in cities driven to bankruptcy unaware as to whom to hold accountable, who benefited by it and how to get out of the mess.
A congressional commission would be able to cut through the red tape and stonewalling.
The Rogers Commission’s final investigative report about the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster led to permanent changes at NASA.
The Tower Commission that investigated the Iran-Contra Affair laid bare a vast secret foreign military venture during the Ronald Reagan administration.
President-elect Donald Trump vows to reverse the damage Biden has done, and a commission would help lay out just how far the crisis spread.
At the very least, a commission could serve the noble purpose of feeding sound information to future American historians.
Don’t let the legacy of Biden stay in the shadows. Now’s the time to get some answers.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
