This is the second of a series to grade the Biden Administration on its first months in office.

Watching the Democratic Presidential primary debates of 2019-20, it wasn’t hard to find the “uh oh” moment when you knew something would not end well. And it came early - June 2019 - during an MSNBC debate moderated by Savannah Guthrie.

"‘This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants,’ Guthrie said to the candidates Thursday night.

“Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, Marianne Williamson, John Hickenlooper, and Eric Swalwell all raised their hand.”

How long do you think it took for word of free health care to reach not only reach the “Northern Triangle” nations of Central America but organizers like drug cartels, “coyotes,” and other groups (pay careful attention to their funding sources) that recruit and facilitate migrations to the southern US border? That, coupled with the use of Facebook pages by cartels (meanwhile, former President Trump remains banned from the social media site, calling him a “public safety risk”) and other nefarious actors to solicit and recruit migrants, has resulted, according to the Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP’s) own website, a massive surge at our southern border.

Did the outgoing Trump Administration fail to warn the incoming Biden Administration, especially its incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, the ethically challenged Alejandro Mayorkas? Nope.

So, how did Biden’s border policies result in a terribly underreported humanitarian crisis?

Biden’s first official mistake - after that 2019 MSNBC debate - happened on Day One of his presidency - canceling the completion of the 700-plus mile border fence (or, if you prefer, wall). That was signal number two that America’s new border policy was “y’all come.” Or, ally ally in free, a schoolyard idiom a few of us may remember. Literally.

The second mistake, also on Day One, was terminating Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” program. You remember - it required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico until their cases or appeals could be heard. Trump successfully negotiated the policy, along with other border enforcement support, with Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO for short).

Mistake three also happened quickly - lying about what the Biden Administration inherited from their predecessors. “One God-awful mess at the border,” as President Biden falsely claimed. It’s one thing to get things wrong; it’s quite another to blame others for it. Courtesy of the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, let’s consult former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf:

“The border crisis is entirely of the Biden administration’s own making, and it’s critical to understand the context in which it’s happening.

“In the final months of the Trump administration, we saw border apprehensions increase because more people were coming illegally in the hopes of a Biden election victory. However, it wasn’t until the Biden administration took office that monthly apprehensions exploded, as Department of Homeland Security numbers make clear.

“This administration inherited a border that was under control thanks to strong and effective action by the Trump administration. In May 2019—the height of the 2019 crisis—140,000 illegal aliens were caught crossing the border. However, by November 2019, this number was down to 42,000, and by April 2020, apprehensions were down to about 17,000.

“This decrease was thanks to the Migrant Protection Protocols (otherwise known as ‘Remain in Place’), which essentially eliminated fraudulent asylum claims at the southern border; asylum cooperative agreements with Northern Triangle countries, which gave individuals the ability to apply for protection closer to their home country instead of the southern border; and more construction of the border wall.

“Every single one of these effective policies was still in place on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden undid them with the stroke of a pen in the first days of his administration. We’ve seen the numbers skyrocket since. Biden inherited the most secure border in U.S. history, and promptly blew it apart.”

All those mistakes were made just as “peak migration” season from Central America was about to begin. And begin it did. And not just from the “northern triangle” countries in Central America. In April alone, 33,000 “migrants” came from Romania and Bangladesh, and God knows where else. And that’s just the ones they know about.

Ally Ally in free, indeed. Instead of remaining in Mexico, these migrants are being shipped via American Airlines (and probably others) to cities across the United States, making every city in America a border town. In all, at least 61,000 migrants have been released into the United States on a “promise” that they’ll show up for their asylum hearings. That was called “catch and release” under the Obama Administration, and a minuscule percentage actually showed up for those “hearings.” They may be poor migrants, but they’re not stupid. “Catch and release” is back, baby.

And Biden even used COVID money to subsidize his border disaster.

But it is actually worse than that. The stories migrants tell are harrowing. Let’s visit one, again courtesy of Daily Signal:

On a recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., saw young girls who had been gang-raped on the journey to America.

In one case, Cammack says, a Border Patrol agent “pointed out a 9-year-old girl” at a processing facility in Donna, Texas.

The girl “came up to me and she had tears in her eyes,” the Florida Republican recalls, adding:

She looked extremely distraught and I was asking her her name. She was really struggling to tell me her name. I asked her where she was from, and I kept hearing this really broken crackle. And I asked the Border Patrol agent. I said, ‘Is she just very upset? What’s going on?’

And he pulled me aside and he said, ‘Ma’am, we found this young girl in the fields. She was being gang-raped by cartel members. And she had been screaming so loud for so long that her vocal cords have given out.’

This is a 9-year-old girl who had been recycled by the cartels, meaning they are children that are sent along to escort single adults to the border so that they can get through the processing, because they don’t run biometrics on children under the age of 12.

It doesn’t get any better. Let us consult the very leftist HuffPost:

Through May, the number of unaccompanied girls younger than 18 caught at the US-Mexico border increased by 77 percent.

But while many of these girls are fleeing their homes because of fears of being sexually assaulted, according to the UNHCR, they are still meeting that same fate on their journey to freedom.

Rape can be perpetrated by anyone along the way, including guides, fellow migrants, bandits or government officials, according to Fusion. Sometimes sex is used as a form of payment, when women and girls don’t have money to pay bribes.

The assaults are so common that many women and girls take contraceptives beforehand as preventative measures.

The people on the front lines are America’s sheriffs at the border, including this Democrat from Texas:

Our sheriff’s office generally consists of just four patrol deputies per shift — for all 2 million acres and all 110 miles of border. It can become overwhelming pretty quick.

ITEM: My deputies fished the body of a young Cuban male out of the Rio Grande, identifying him by the passport in his pocket. He likely traveled with another person, but that individual has yet to turn up.

ITEM: Unlike those from Central and South America who turn themselves in with hopes of proving claims of asylum, Mexican nationals are subject to immediate deportation at the nearest point of entry and so are more likely to evade capture. Earlier this month, a Mexican national was killed when the driver of the vehicle failed to yield, rolling the vehicle over and ejecting the deceased. A week later, eight Mexican nationals were killed in a high-speed chase that ended in a head-on collision, leaving two U.S. citizens in critical but stable condition, one being an 11-year-old girl. 

ITEM: We were called to recover the remains of a Haitian woman, whose body was located on the American side of the river. She was pregnant with twins, and her pregnancy was at term. Her husband’s body was found nearby, on the Mexican side.

And let’s not forget that the Mexican side of the US border really isn’t under the control of Mexico’s government. Drug cartels run the show. There is no better journalism on the border crisis than from John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist:

But there’s another dynamic to the border crisis that at least a few reporters aren’t willing to ignore: the surge of fentanyl coming into the United States from Mexico, the rising chaos in border communities, and the breakdown of anti-cartel operations between the two countries.

The thread that ties all these things together is an aspect of the border little discussed and seldom understood in America: cartels. Mexican drug cartels are smuggling unprecedented amounts of fentanyl into the country at a time drug overdoses are spiking.

They are making billions off industrializing illegal immigration, sending over families and children — all of whom must pay the cartels in order to cross the Rio Grande — to bog down Border Patrol while they smuggle in adults who want to evade detection. They are also now powerful enough to exert significant influence over Mexican officialdom, with the result that joint anti-cartel operations between the United States and Mexico have all but ceased.

And guess which groups appear to be assisting the drug cartels in their smuggling operations? Useful American idiots.

A smart politician facing a crisis - whether or not of their own making - would normally seek to diffuse responsibility by inviting others to help solve the problem. Thus, a normal Administration would make it a priority to pass some immigration reform legislation and create conditions to make a deal very attractive.

After all, Congress has come close in recent years, including the ill-fated bipartisan proposal initially proposed by Arizona US Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl that became part of a “Gang of 8” bill (disclosure: I was Jon Kyl’s first Chief of Staff in the House of Representatives). However flawed, it was a start, and much of it remains relevant and available as part of a deal to stem and fix the disaster at the border.

Of course, the first step by a smart executive would be enforcing existing laws. It’s a political no-brainer, really. It would shift the blame to long-gone politicians (the last immigration reform bill, “Simpson-Mazzoli,” was passed in 1986) and help spur reform from both sides of the spectrum. But no, the Biden folks do not appear to be that smart. They refuse to enforce the law or neither develop nor create the conditions to foment a truly achievable, bipartisan immigration reform bill. This means the Biden people have de facto embraced the “open borders” agenda of their far-left base. How’s that working out for everyone?

We can wrap this up. Biden not only gets a big fat F grade for his border policies, but he’s suspended from class for lack of integrity in the manner in which he and his equally disastrous Vice President - whom he put in charge of the border but has yet to visit - have acted thus far.

The solutions are obvious but politically untenable for this crowd. First, reinstate Trump’s policies. All of them, including finishing the border fence, already funded by statute. That would bring Democrats to the table, albeit kicking and screaming.

Second, focus on immigration reform that eliminates family and chain migration that drives much of the current surge, adopting Canada’s and Australia’s “point system” for immigration. That would bring Republicans to the table, salivating.

Third, strive to keep US-trained, and educated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates in the US, helping us, not communist China. That would bring “Big Tech” and lots of other corporations to the table, even though some might be repulsed at the suggestion. I get that. But politics and legislative success require addition, not subtraction, for success.

And fourth, yes, let’s look at finding a way to finally stabilize and clean up corruption and crime in Central American countries, much of it spurred by Communist infiltrators from Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China. Previous efforts have not worked, so some new ideas involving carrots and sticks must be brought to the table. In addition, US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has a great bill that remains a framework (with modifications) to address immigration long term.

This would be such a huge win and legacy for Joe Biden (and, frankly, Kamala Harris) if they’d just embrace it, own it, and lead it. And sadly, we’ll be waiting a long time for that. Are they up to it? Candidly, no. And we’re all the worse for it, including the immigrants making their way here. Expect more casualties. Real ones.

It is not inaccurate to say, “Biden lied. People died.” And to think so-called “compassionate” pro-immigrant groups who love Biden’s policies are even getting to decide which migrant victims are allowed into the US, creating a new incentive for people to enlist with drug cartels and corrupt coyotes to make the dangerous, even deadly trek to the border. They should be ashamed of themselves for being a part of this humanitarian crisis. They are just as culpable for the carnage.