What’s Really Happening At the Border? 2 Christian Leaders Go See for Themselves
Donald Trump has inherited a crisis on America’s southern border. Recently, two respected leaders traveled to the border to see the situation for themselves. Upon returning, they tried their best to get out the word on what they saw, which differs from the leftist view often presented in the media.
Driven By Compassion
One was Sam Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who appeared on Fox News with Shannon Bream to refute allegations made by freshman New York Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, an avowed socialist. AOC, as she’s called in the media, had made statements in 2019 that our border facilities were like Nazi concentration camps and that some detainees had been told to drink from toilets.
“I must be living in a parallel universe somewhere,” Rodriguez told Bream, adding that he’s a devoted Trekkie. “There must be some sort of breach in the space-time continuum.”
After hearing the news reports that children were living in deplorable conditions at the detention center outside El Paso, Texas, Rodriguez contacted the White House to gain access to the facility. He was permitted to walk through unrestricted and ask questions freely. “I did not find soiled diapers. I did not find crying children. I did not find deplorable conditions,” he said. “Quite the opposite. I found amazing people on both sides trying to make a very difficult circumstance better. So I don’t know where everyone else is visiting.”
He asked the border patrol agents—most of whom were Latino—if what he was seeing had been staged. “[They answered], ‘Pastor Sam, absolutely not. You are looking at the very thing that existed here for a number of weeks.'”
He said he also learned that the attorneys who reported seeing soiled diapers and other appalling conditions never actually toured the center. “They never visited what I visited. They took that information, anecdotally, from interviews with children—with children, mind you—from the age of 2 to the age of 17.”
Rodriguez, who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, told Bream both political parties have failed miserably to fix the broken immigration system: “We got here because Congress … is playing politics with millions of individuals, with the sovereignty of our nation and with the protection of our border.”
A Worldwide Wave of Poverty
Around the same time, Dr. James Dobson, a venerated evangelical leader, visited the border at McAllen, Texas, at the invitation of the White House. He then sent out a widely circulated letter to his constituents, partly to fulfill a promise to the border patrol agents he met to set the record straight on what is really happening.
“I came away with an array of intense emotions,” he wrote. “First, I was profoundly grieved over the misery of thousands of people. Second, I felt a deep appreciation for those who are doing their best to help in an impossible circumstance. Third, and frankly, I was angry at the political fat cats who have deliberately allowed this chaos to occur for political or financial gain. They, and their friends in the fake media, have told the American people that there is no crisis at the border! Shame on them all.”
Dobson said his heart aches for those caught up in the debacle at the border. But he added:
“Lest I be misunderstood, let me make clear that I am among the majority of Americans who want the border to be closed to those who attempt to enter illegally. There has to be a better solution than this. I have wondered, with you, why the authorities don’t just deny these refugees access to this nation. Can’t we just send them back to their places of origin? The answer I received was ‘No,’ for reasons I will explain.
“Only 10% of the detainees are Mexicans. This year alone, people have come to our southern border from 127 countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, India, China, Albania, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other nations around the world. They speak their native tongues, which means they can’t be understood by each other or the staff. What are we to do with them? The Mexican government will not take them back, and there is no place to send them. Our current laws do not permit us to repatriate them to their country of origin. This is a disaster with no solution or projected conclusion.”
Then Dobson makes this profound point about what will happen if we do nothing: “Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.”
As leaders such as Dobson and Rodriguez speak out, the truth about the situation is becoming better understood—as well as the risk of allowing this flood of immigration to continue. {eoa}
This is an adapted excerpt from God, Trump, and the 2020 Election by Stephen E. Strang. Copyright ©2020 Published by Charisma House. Used by permission.
