Republican complaints about border security are about as common as the sunrise. GOP officials effectively, if not literally, accuse the Biden administration every day of not doing enough along the U.S./Mexico border.
But occasionally, these complaints get a little weird.
For example, quite a few Republicans have complained in recent months about U.S. border officials stopping illegal drugs before they enter the country. The Republican National Committee, for example, published an odd tweet in February that read, “Illicit drugs are flowing into the country at an alarming rate because of Biden’s open border. 839 pounds of deadly fentanyl was seized at the southern border in January alone.”
The key word, of course, was “seized.” On the one hand, the RNC wants people to believe President Joe Biden has adopted an open-border policy. On the other hand, the RNC also pointed to illegal drugs stopped at the southern border thanks to the Biden administration’s border-security measures.
How do Republicans reconcile the contradiction? They don’t. In fact, they apparently hope the disconnect goes unnoticed.
This came to mind on Tuesday night when Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona published a related tweet — which has since been deleted — which read:
“Border Patrol agents have apprehended more than 1,000,000,000 migrants at our southern border in just 6 months. President Biden’s open border policies are fueling this crisis! #BidenBorderCrisis”
Part of the problem, of course, is that the GOP congresswoman used a few too many zeroes: As Lesko saw it, more than a billion migrants were apprehended at the border. That’s more than the population of the United States and Mexico combined — times two.
But the unfortunate arithmetical error was really just the tip of the iceberg.









