By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Kamala Harris finally went to the border on last Friday, June 25, briefly visiting a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, touring a migrant center, and meeting with five young girls from Central America. The main event, however, was a meeting with El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz.
Wanderer readers will recall Seitz’s strident support of open borders. He became a national leader in the movement after he attacked nine state attorneys general and a Catholic governor for supporting U.S. immigration law. In an op-ed for USA Today in the early days of the Trump administration, Seitz called them “hypocrites and pharisees.”
Last year, Seitz got a pat on the back after he knelt before a Black Lives Matter placard. However, he has never publicly criticized Catholic politicians in his diocese.
During last Friday’s meeting, Seitz urged Harris “to see the foreboding walls of steel that mark the southern boundary of this borderland community and to see, beyond them, the suffering and aspirations that motivate people to leave family and homeland.”
Seitz did not condemn the corrupt governments and terrorists south of the border. Instead, he blamed the United States, citing “our entanglement in an economy that kills, our inaction on climate change, our fueling of death-dealing violence with weapons of war and drug consumption, our obsession for power over the common good, our addiction to short results and eliminating opponents over the patient cultivation of social friendship, our indifference towards life, our racism. Addressing root causes means addressing these things, too,” he said.
Seitz’s comments echoed the views of Yang Jiechi, Communist China’s top diplomat, who blasted Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a 15-minute anti-American harangue in their February meeting. Blinken had made no effort to rebut Yang’s vitriol, but certainly the woman who had sworn in January to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” would rise in the defense of her country in the face of Seitz’s rant.
No such luck.
When they parted, Seitz offered Harris a rosary blessed by the Pope.
Home Folks Speak Up
The former Director of Immigration Enforcement told Fox News that Harris “picks El Paso because she doesn’t want to see the devastation that her administration’s policies have caused” in the Rio Grande Valley, 800 miles away from her El Paso photo-op.
In a letter to Harris and Biden provided to Breitbart Texas, three Americans living in the real heart of the border crisis, spoke up in defense of their neighbors.
“As Texans who live and work along the Southern Border, we are asking America to pay attention to the crisis raging at our doorstep,” they wrote. “We’re asking America to listen when we tell you that it is a crisis. It is chaos.”
While Bishop Seitz urges Harris to listen to the “suffering and aspirations” of illegal aliens, these Texans describe the frustrations and fears of Americans, many of them Catholic, who live in the Valley. There, Border Patrol agents have apprehended more than 270,000 migrants so far this fiscal year — a 406 percent increase over the previous year.
“We are on the front lines of this disaster,” the Texans wrote. “And it started just weeks after Biden and Harris took office.
“Crime is surging as drug cartels and human smugglers capitalize on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s open-borders agenda. Migrant children are being abandoned in the desert and dropped over walls. Human beings are drowning in the Rio Grande because Biden and Harris told them they could come.
“The deadly drug fentanyl is flooding our communities — Texas officials have already seized enough smuggled fentanyl to kill 21.5 million people,” they wrote. “Those attempting to cross the border include members of the vicious gang MS-13 and people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.
“Our neighbors are scared to leave their homes. How is this acceptable in America?”
Biden, Bishops, And Borders
Like Kamala Harris, Catholic bishops don’t seem to think that there’s a crisis at the border. Many don’t think there should be any border at all. On the practical level, that view has put Biden and the bishops in a quiet alliance with the criminal Coyote gangs that traffic not only illegals, but drugs, weapons, and kidnapped sex slaves as well.
Under Biden, money is no object. Illegals now borrow up to $20,000 per person because the Coyotes can practically guarantee them successful entry into the interior of the United States. There they can quickly begin sending U.S. dollars back home to pay off their trafficking loans.
The USCCB is so devoted to unlimited immigration that they divert funds given to Catholic Relief Services to fund the illegals. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), a nationwide group comprising hundreds of lawyers, is prominent among the beneficiaries of the funds which the Catholic faithful donate to help “the poorest of the poor.” The CRS bulletin insert calmly explains that by diverting the funds to hundreds of impoverished lawyers, we “offer legal assistance to Jesus in struggling immigrants.”
Let’s face it. America’s Catholic bishops are never going to confront “Catholic Joe” Biden. CRS receives over half of its annual budget — half a billion dollars a year — from the taxpayer. The same is true for Catholic Charities USA. Bishops get zero government funding to fight abortion. Do the math.
Detritus
Last week we reported that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) had brushed off a question about his family’s membership in an exclusive all-white yacht club. It’s a “long tradition,” he said.
Well, liberal white Democrat racists might be a “long tradition,” but David Harsanyi reminds us that Whitehouse isn’t a fan of all tradition. Not at all.
Take Catholic tradition. “Last year . . . Whitehouse, along with a number of senators — including Kamala Harris — treated members of the Knights of Columbus, a 140-year-old fraternal Catholic charitable organization steeped in tradition, as if it they were in a secret cabal of seditious papists,” Harsanyi reports.
Long ago, historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called anti-Catholicism “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” Seems like it still is.
And it looks like trannies are invading more than women’s sports. A man named Kataluna Enriquez has just won the once-coveted Miss Nevada USA title.
The Washington Examiner reports that Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now refers to outrage over violent crime spikes across the country as “hysteria.” Instead of building jails, she says, “the answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental healthcare, and overall healthcare, employment. . . .”
Say, speaking of the “poorest of the poor”: When the lockdowns began last spring and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans, did any Catholic prelate, diocese, or NGO go public and condemn the politicians and bureaucrats that imposed the diktats and close down the Mass for months?
And meanwhile, the corporate Left continues to condemn slavery that ended 155 years ago; but corporate elites are pleased to cheer slavery today if it’s profitable.
Nike Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe defended his company’s relationship with Communist China in a phone call with Wall Street analysts on earnings.
“Nike is a brand that is of China and for China,” Donahoe said.
It sure is. Nike recently joined Apple and Coca-Cola to lobby against a House bill condemning forced labor (a.k.a. slavery) of Uyghur Muslims. The bill passed 406-3.
And speaking of China, The Epoch Times reports that British Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s secretary for relations with states (equivalent to a foreign minister), doesn’t think condemning Communist China’s persecution of Catholics in Hong Kong “would make any difference whatever.”
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