Liberals in Washington and in the media are insisting up and down that there’s no crisis at the nation’s southern border and that President Donald Trump has manufactured the issue out of thin air.

But while they sit in their ivory towers, people who deal with the border on a daily basis are saying something very different.

On Tuesday, a veteran Arizona sheriff pushed back against the narrative that the president invented this crisis during testimony at the Capitol.

“I have been in Pima County for 32 years,” Sheriff Mark Napier said. “We have had a border crisis for all 32 years that I have been in Pima County.”

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The sheriff said details of law enforcement in his county — which includes Tucson and covers a large stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border — have changed over the years but the fundamental problems are not new.

“The nuances and the elements of that crisis have evolved over time, but nonetheless, we have had a crisis all this while,” Napier said.

The sheriff, who has been involved in Arizona law enforcement since the 1980s, scolded liberals such as House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who have suggested that Trump fabricated the border issue as nothing but a political talking point.

“To promulgate the idea that this is a crisis created or manufactured by the current administration is simply false,” Napier said, according to the Washington Examiner.

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“No reasonable, thinking person could assume the current administration has sought to entice families with children and unaccompanied minors to come in caravans to our border, or in some manner, sought an escalation of the trafficking of hard narcotics into our country,” the sheriff said.

That was a reference to the many groups that have set off from Central America in recent months, pushing north and often clashing with border agents in Mexico and the United States.

There is strong evidence that those caravans are being organized by radical leftists, certainly not by Trump.

Democratic lawmakers aren’t the only ones who have tried to downplay the situation at the border. Numerous left-leaning media outlets have scoffed at the idea of a crisis and openly mocked Trump for taking the problem seriously.

Last year, for example, MSNBC ran a story that declared the border crisis “doesn’t exist.”

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“Trump is scrambling to respond to an emergency that exists only in conservatives’ imaginations,” Steve Benen wrote on the official blog page for “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

But the expert responsible for keeping a large portion of Arizona safe has a very different take.

“To suggest that there does not exist a crisis on our southern border is intellectually dishonest. To be steadfast to that assertion despite clear evidence to the contrary is to be intellectually dishonest with malice,” Napier testified.

He isn’t alone. Even former President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, admitted just days ago — on MSNBC, no less — that “we are truly in a crisis” at the border.

When you boil it down, there are really only two possibilities: Either sheriffs and law enforcement experts across the country are all lying about what’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border, or liberals are playing dishonest political games to spite Trump.

We’ll let you decide for yourself which one is more likely.

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