EDITORIAL: No sympathy for sanctuary cities

OPINION:

“Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”

That sage advice — the earliest version of which dates back to “Aesop’s Fables,” more than 2,000 years ago — has withstood the test of time, but its cautionary tale was apparently lost on D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Ms. Bowser and Mr. Adams — who, so far as we know, haven’t uttered a single word critical of President Biden’s open-borders immigration policies — have been complaining loudly in recent weeks that their cities are been inundated with thousands of illegal immigrants.

That’s a tiny fraction of the total crossing the southwest border, but they’re being bused to those cities by frontline-state Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona to dramatize their states’ plight and to send a message to the president.  

As long as the migrants remained in Texas and Arizona, or went somewhere — anywhere — else, Ms. Bowser and Mr. Adams turned a blind eye to the Biden administration’s flagrant — and arguably impeachable — refusal to enforce federal immigration laws. Mr. Biden’s inaction has resulted in hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants swarming across the border every month.

Now, the District of Columbia and New York City — and other Democrat-dominated jurisdictions — are reaping the inevitable consequences of their “sanctuary” city/county/state policies on illegal immigration.

They have no one to blame but themselves, albeit with (more than) a little help from their friends, Mr. Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who risibly continues to insist — evidence to the contrary notwithstanding — that the southwestern border is “secure.”

The first busload of illegal migrants from Texas reportedly arrived in Washington on April 13, and to date, about 100 buses have brought as many as 4,000 illegal migrants to the nation’s capital.

Ms. Bowser has described the problem as a “humanitarian crisis that we expect to escalate.” Curiously, illegal immigration wasn’t a humanitarian crisis — at least not for Ms. Bowser — until the illegal migrants started being dropped off on D.C.’s doorstep.

The massive influx of illegal migrants is straining the cities’ emergency shelters and other public services — so much so, in fact, that on July 28, the D.C. mayor formally requested that the National Guard be deployed to deal with the surge, which she contended had reached a “tipping point.”

That’s not the proper role of the National Guard, and it’s not clear in any case how exactly the Guard could provide housing, food, clothing, health care and child care, education, and other services to illegal aliens. The request was rightly rebuffed by the Pentagon last week.

(Just as an aside, that would be the same National Guard that the D.C. mayor had rejected when offered the crowd-control services they actually are equipped to provide by then-President Donald Trump ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.)

Mr. Adams’ office also pleaded for federal help, in a July 19 statement that read in part, “New York has experienced a sharp increase in asylum seekers from Latin America and other regions, with more than 2,800 individuals entering New York City’s shelter system,” which he said was already “overburdened.”

Mr. Abbott was understandably unmoved by their anguish, as are we.

When he urged Mr. Adams to travel to Texas to see firsthand how what the Big Apple is experiencing is infinitesimal compared with illegal immigration’s impact on the Lone Star State, the mayor shamelessly refused.

As for the District of Columbia, Mr. Abbott on July 28 tweeted: “D.C. is experiencing a fraction of the disastrous impact the border crisis has caused Texas. Mayor Bowser should stop attacking Texas for securing the border & demand Joe Biden do his job.”

Regrettably, that’s unlikely, given the cavalier attitude of the administration reflected in this exchange that same day between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy:

Ms. Jean-Pierre: “Republicans [are] using migrants as a political tool. … ”

Mr. Doocy: “So, the White House’s preference would be for small towns in Texas and Arizona to have to take care of these migrants, rather than a large metropolitan city like Washington, D.C.?”

Ms. Jean-Pierre: “They are sending migrants to big cities on purpose, using them as a political ploy.”

If busing illegal migrants to New York City and Washington hasn’t dissuaded Mr. Biden from continuing his destructive and indefensible open-borders policies, perhaps the migrants should be rerouted to his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and to Rehoboth, Delaware, the oceanside community where the president has a beach house. Perhaps that would change his mind.