ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- The Biden-Harris administration has united conservatives and liberals. Both are disgusted by how the Democrats have mishandled the U.S.-Mexico border -- albeit for different reasons.

A recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that only 31% -- less than a third -- of Americans approved of how the administration has dealt with the immigration issue.

We hear a lot from conservatives who worry that dangerous individuals are entering our country through a porous border. But many liberals also fear that migrants seeking refuge are being mistreated, abused and exploited on the regular.

Due to a combination of incompetence and neglect by the Biden-Harris administration -- a pattern, by the way, consistent with the last two administrations -- those fears have been realized.

Americans will soon have to decide between two presidential candidates, neither of whom is morally fit to be president.

I'll gladly stipulate that former President Donald Trump doesn't have the character, depth or temperament to lead the country, and therefore he should not be reelected.

Even so, I'm sorry to say that Vice President Kamala Harris has also been disqualified.

I can already hear the partisans holler about how Americans are faced with a binary choice between Trump and Harris. Yada, yada.

But I'm not in the partisanship business. As a journalist, I'm in the truth business.

Here's the truth. A damning internal report from within the Biden-Harris administration has made clear that the second-in-command ought not be promoted to the highest office in the land.

The Inspector General's Office of the Department of Homeland Security found that the administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents. The 14-page report -- which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023, which means it extends to the Trump administration as well -- said that countless children were released into the United States in the custody of "qualified sponsors." Those children are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other ghastly sorts of exploitation, the report said.

The figures are staggering. As of May 2024, as many as 448,000 migrant children have arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors. They were allowed entry, and many were given a date to appear in immigration court. But authorities cannot track the whereabouts of many of them.

According to the New York Post, the only reason that this human rights catastrophe came to light is because a federal whistleblower came forward and said that she believes many of the migrant kids were in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers. Tara Rodas was helping the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with an influx of minors in 2021 when she was horrified to learn that she was handing those children to "traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad actors, bad, bad, bad people."

As vice president, Harris is co-owner of this debacle. Plain and simple. As such, she lacks the moral authority to be president because she failed to live up to the top responsibility of anyone who has that job: to protect the vulnerable, the victimized and the voiceless.

Strangely, Harris has been disqualified for about a month. The media largely missed the story. That's either because so many reporters, editors, anchors and producers are pulling for Harris or because they had other stories to cover when the report came out.

The report was released on Aug. 19, the same day that the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago.

Of course, it's also possible that the story got buried because it has to do with an issue that most of the media doesn't fully understand or care much about: immigration.

This is the one issue that Harris was supposed to take point on. Biden put her in charge of cleaning up the U.S.-Mexico border by addressing the "root causes" of migration.

In June 2021, Harris went to Guatemala and boldly told those who might be thinking of heading north "do not come." That was her "Mission Accomplished" moment.

The Guatemalans didn't listen. Neither did the Venezuelans, Hondurans, Colombians or hundreds of thousands of other migrants from dozens of countries.

In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol had a record 2.5 million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border.

That figure includes thousands of unaccompanied minors. Their whereabouts may be unknown, but their fate was sealed by the incompetence and indifference of powerful people in two separate administrations -- one Democrat, one Republican -- who failed to use their power for good. And that provided an opening for evil.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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