OPINION: GOP can’t complain about Biden’s migrants when they’re not stepping in

It’s all very well for Kevin McCarthy and other GOP members of Congress to rant on Fox News about how terrible the border crisis is – but what are they doing about it?

At least 2 million illegal migrants crossed the border last year, and all we heard from Congress was hot air.

Republicans in Washington will tell you they are powerless to do anything about illegal migration until after they regain control in November, assuming they do.

But one lone New York gubernatorial candidate did more to inform the public about the Biden administration’s partnership with people-smuggling cartels than did members of Congress with vastly more resources.

Rob Astorino didn’t rest on empty rhetoric. The former Westchester County executive took action.

Despite being slandered by Democrats as a racist, he exposed the deliberate subterfuge of the Biden administration as it flies illegal migrants around the country and secretes them in unsuspecting communities.

Astorino was the source of the police bodycam footage the New York Post reported on last week, in which a Westchester County cop went to White Plains airport Aug. 13, 2021, to investigate why migrant passengers were being unloaded from a charter jet onto the tarmac hours after the midnight curfew, in contravention of federal law.

The 51-minute footage, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, was damning. Federal contractors were recorded admitting they had been instructed by the Department of Homeland Security to keep the migrant flights “hush hush” and on the “down low” because “if this gets out, the government is betraying the American people.”

The recording buttressed The Post’s stories last October, in which they recorded charter flights arriving at White Plains, disgorging migrants who were bussed to various locations in the tri-state area in the dead of night.

“We have a government that continues to lie to us,” says Astorino, “that has failed in its most essential duty to secure our nation’s borders and uphold the rule of law... This is a matter of public safety, public health and the people’s right to know.”

Normal patriotic Americans are incandescent with rage about this betrayal by the federal government and yet their Republican representatives are all talk, no action.

At least Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene actually has introduced impeachment resolutions into the House, accusing the president of violations of immigration law that are causing a national-security crisis.

There’s a reason that illegal migrants marching toward the US-Mexico border idolize Biden. He explicitly invited them here and promised free health care and other goodies during his campaign.

“I would in fact make sure that there is, that we immediately surge to the border, all those people who are seeking asylum,” he said during a debate in September 2019. “That’s who we are.”

The world heard him loud and clear and that’s why millions of aspiring economic refugees from Central America and places as far afield as Bangladesh, Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, Uzbekistan and Eritrea, have paid people smugglers as much as $9000 each to make the trek to the southern border.

Border patrol agents are furious about being forced to facilitate this invasion. When Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas showed up last week to a meeting in Yuma, Ariz., his reception was openly hostile, and one agent turned his back. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz faced the same anger from his troops in Laredo, Texas.

Leaked footage showed Ortiz repeatedly being challenged. “For evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing,” one agent told him. “Good men are doing nothing. You’re allowing illegal aliens to be dropped off in communities.”

Bravo to these brave agents, who risk their jobs by speaking truth to power.

Mayorkas deserves to be brought to account for dozens of reasons, not least for allowing his horse-mounted Border Patrol agents to be defamed with the false accusation that they “whipped” Haitian migrants.

To his credit, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has aligned with other red-state counterparts to sue the Biden administration in an effort to stem the torrent of illegal migration.

On Friday they lodged a suit against Mayorkas over Biden’s “Central American Minors Program.”

The program, never authorized by Congress, allows illegal migrants to have their children flown here to join them at taxpayer expense.

This is illegal, the lawsuit says, because under the Remain in Mexico program, which Paxton and his group of AGs had reinstated by the Supreme Court, any asylum seeker crossing the border must be deported immediately to Mexico. Instead, most are being flown into the interior and then we pay to fetch their children.

“No sovereign nation would reward those who break the law by permitting family members abroad to join them in living in the sovereign territory unlawfully, particularly with the assistance of the government itself,” reads Paxton’s lawsuit.

It’s a bleak irony that President Biden is arriving in New York this week to discuss law and order. He should get his own house in order first.

Miranda Devine is a writer, New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor.