Our Border Patrol agents have not only been conscripted as the world’s day care center, they have now become the world’s hospital for dangerous diseases. Perhaps serving as the world’s police force no longer looks so bad in comparison.

First, the illegal immigrants came for jobs and family unification with other relatives who illegally violated our sovereignty. Then they came for welfare and abortion access. Now they are coming with dangerous diseases. Yet the politicians, rather than seeking to shut down the flow and protect Americans from the public health concern, are pressuring our Border Patrol to become the world’s hospital, with stricter “malpractice” standards than domestic health care practitioners. Meanwhile, the evil drug cartels and human smugglers who are orchestrating this flow in order to paralyze the Border Patrol are making a killing off organized crime.

According to a report by USA Today, “Between Dec. 22 and Sunday, the agency reported 451 cases referred to doctors or other providers, including 259 children.” They report that the illegals have increasingly “been arriving with all kinds of ailments, many with flu or pneumonia that can be particularly pervasive and dangerous this time of year.”

CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan made it clear in a statement on Monday that many of those coming with “cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, parasites” did not develop them on the way but actually left for our country while ill. This is quite literally what our country has tried to stop since the colonial times. Now we have infectious disease chain migration, whereby our politicians are encouraging them to come here with diseases and chastising our agents for not treating them fast enough.

Part of a “Gaza style” media warfare on our sovereignty

What affect does this have on our security at the border? Now, on top of dealing with flows of over 100 migrants at a time sent their way by the cartels, Border Patrol is forced to use more resources and add an entirely new layer of emergency medical assessments. The DHS is calling on the CDC to investigate the cause of this growing trend.

Picture our border for a moment as a war zone. We have the worst drugs, gangs, and criminals being smuggled over by some of the most violent organizations such as Jalisco, Sinaloa, Gulfo, and Juarez – groups that rival ISIS in terms of their immoral tactics. We need every ounce of talent and time from our agents oriented toward stopping that flow and their criminal activity. Instead, Schumer and Pelosi have enabled these cartels to successfully launch lawfare against our agents. The cartels use the migrants as a blitz play in a dangerous game of migration football with our agents, as Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, described to me in an interview last month. The cartels now know that our agents have become a day care center and processing venue for tens of thousands of migrants. That way they can confidently pour drugs and dangerous criminals over our border without ever being confronted by an agent doing patrol work.

Where are the agents? They are now walking on eggshells, dealing with all the sickest people in Latin America, often made worse by abuse at the hands of these very cartels. But the cartels know our agents will get blamed for it. This is part of a broader psychological/media war against our agents, in the spirit of what Hamas has been doing to the Israeli military at the Gaza border for years. Just last night, CBP put out a statement exposing how migrants were attempting “to lift toddler sized children up and over the concertina wire” of the San Diego fence while simultaneously throwing rocks at border agents. Agents were, therefore, “not in a position to safely assist the children due to the large number of rocks being thrown at them,” according to CBP.

The abuse of our border agents is even more appalling and dangerous when you consider how few of them there are patrolling at any given moment. Brandon Judd testified before the House Oversight subcommittee on national security last April that because of the growing inefficient bureaucracy, only “around 50 are assigned to actually patrol the border in a 24-hour period of time” at the Rio Grande Valley, our busiest sector.

Thus, quite literally, Schumer and Pelosi are not only enabling but facilitating the vilest human and drug smuggling network ever assembled. Then they have the nerve to virtue-signal about the shutdown and suspended pay for border agents. Rather than abuse these agents and pay them to facilitate an invasion – quite the opposite of what they signed up for – why don’t we restore their original jobs?

Stopping criminals, diseases, and public charges from entering our country was once a universal ideal

Then there are the forgotten people of this debate. What about Americans suffering from the dangers of illegal immigration? Why is the only concern of the media directed toward the welfare of the invaders, not the security of the American people whom the politicians are charged with protecting? Imagine if we had thousands of migrants being smuggled through our border by ISIS and Border Patrol was forced to worry about their needs instead of stopping the danger to America by the very evildoers orchestrating it. Well, just because the media hasn’t exposed people to the names of Jalisco and Sinaloa the way they do ISIS doesn’t mean they are any less evil and dangerous than ISIS.

Look how far we have regressed as a society and a nation-state. Protecting Americans from migrants who are criminals, public charges, or those carrying infectious diseases was so deeply embedded in our social compact since our founding that the Supreme Court said states could even brush up against federal powers over foreign commerce to protect their own welfare.

In the 1820s and ’30s, New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland (the “border states” of those days) passed laws mandating inspections of landing vessels at the ports to weed out those who would likely be a public charge or who were carrying diseases. In City of New York v. Milne (1837), the Supreme Court deemed New York’s regulation of ships transporting immigrants preventing “multitudes of poor persons” from coming “without possessing the means of supporting themselves” as constitutional and not infringing upon the foreign commerce power of the federal government.

Here is what the court said about the importance of even state sovereignty against all forms of liability of foreign nationals:

There can be no mode in which the power to regulate internal police could be more appropriately exercised. … Can anything fall more directly within the police power and internal regulation of a state than that which concerns the care and management of paupers or convicts or any other class or description of persons that may be thrown into the country and likely to endanger its safety, or become chargeabl[e] for their maintenance? […] We think it as competent and as necessary for a state to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts as it is to guard against the physical pestilence which may arise from unsound and infections articles imported or from a ship the crew of which may be laboring under an infectious disease.

This is why I believe states like Texas and Arizona are well within their rights to take precautionary measures to block the invasion at their borders, irrespective of what the federal government does.

Either way, if this is how our early political figures thought of state powers to reject infectious migrants and public charges (and certainly criminals), how much more is it the responsibility of the federal government to protect the whole of the union? And in those days, those transporting migrants weren’t flooding our country with drugs and gangs and weren’t run by smugglers who chop off limbs like ISIS.

Yet the first order of business for House Democrats upon assuming control will be to hold hearings not on the harm posed to Americans by “convicts, paupers, and infected persons,” as our laws have dictated for years, but on accusing Border Patrol of not performing miracles to revive those killed or seriously endangered by the smugglers and evil parents.

A growing number of children are being brought here with tuberculosis. But these are just the ones we apprehend or those who surrender themselves to the border agents. What about the ones we never catch? They are in our communities.

As early as 1907, we passed laws singling out those with tuberculosis for exclusion. Yet 112 years later, we have gone backwards by allowing the courts to essentially invite in a population that is 83 times more likely to have TB than Americans. Worse, rather than turning them back, we are now on the hook for their survival. There is nothing progressive about that.

If a government can’t turn back and deter invaders from bringing in infectious diseases we worked to eradicate a century ago, and if their actions will only embolden the drug and human smugglers, then why have a Border Patrol at all?