Democratic border city mayor blasts Biden: He’s ‘disconnected from reality’ on border crisis
The Democratic mayor of a small Texas city along the U.S.-Mexico border put the Biden administration on blast this week over its woeful mismanagement of the immigration crisis, which he lamented is disproportionately effecting border communities like his.
"You have a breach on national security levels that have never before been seen in modern history and you're not even batting an eye about it, you're not even calling it a 'crisis', you're calling it a 'challenge,'" Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano told the New York Post on Sunday. "It's a slap in the face."
Lozano's scathing criticism did not come out of nowhere. The scrappy 38-year-old mayor made headlines in February when he urgently begged President Biden in a video message to stop releasing illegal immigrants into his city of just over 35,000 residents. He explained his community was "completely and utterly spread thin with resources" and would not be able to accommodate the migrants.
City of Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano makes an urgent plea to the President of the United States youtu.be
But Lozano noted on Sunday that his plea "fell on deaf ears," as the number of migrants flooding Del Rio has only increased to approximately 150 a day.
"I'm not trying to demonize the humanitarian aspect by any means but my responsibility is to the city of Del Rio and the residents of Del Rio, Texas, my responsibilities are to the American people that got me elected," Lozano told the Post. "Nobody wants to actually tackle the issue, you're condoning unlawful behavior, period. There's a lawful way to enter the United States, there's a lawful way to seek asylum and it just undermines the entire immigration process."
The mayor characterized the current immigration crisis a federal problem that the Biden administration created by broadcasting lenient enforcement measures, but one that has ultimately fallen into the laps of border communities.
Furious that he is now tasked with attempting to manage the crisis with local dollars, Lozano said, "It's not even in our budget. Every line item is accounted for in municipal government, we're very fine tuned in budget. It's not appropriate.
"It just blows my mind how disconnected from reality [they are] or maybe they do know, maybe they just don't want to call a spade a spade, you know, because it's uncomfortable," he seethed. "Let's be real, the Biden administration sent that message that you know 'we're going to reverse this, we're going to do that' and sure enough within days, within days, it started happening again.
"It was completely predictable," he continued. "You have this policy where unlawful entry is being condoned, criminal activity is being condoned, these migrants are using the cartels to traverse Mexico and that's a fact and organized criminal activity is rising because of that."
"I'm calling them out, I'm so frustrated as a border town mayor about all of this," he said.
Lozano is not the only border Democrat upset with the Biden administration over its naive and dangerous open borders policies. Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar warned earlier this month that such a policy would ultimately lead to dangerous consequences for communities along the border.
"You just can't say, 'Yeah, yeah, let everybody in' — because then we're affected down there at the border," Cuellar said.