Democrat presidential candidates have plans to decriminalize crossing the border and “virtually eliminate immigration detention.” And, oh, by the way, illegals can access “free” health care. “That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders. That is unworkable, unwise, and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress. And if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”

Those remarks weren’t commentary from the Democrats’ favorite immigration bogeyman, President Donald Trump. Those were the words of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who worked for Barack Obama.

Johnson also slammed Democrats for politicizing “kids in cages.” He noted, “Chain-link barriers, partitions, fences, cages — whatever you want to call them — were not invented on January 2017.” The struggle for the Border Patrol, Johnson says, is timing and numbers. “During that 72-hour period” before illegals are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, “when you have something that is a multiple — like four times of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure — you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids.” In other words, Obama’s DHS “put kids in cages,” too, because it’s the most humane way to deal with enforcing the law in the face of an invasion.

By the way, these children have become a smuggler’s dream, and a free pass across the border for others.

And yet we have Democrats like presidential hopeful Cory Booker proposing the elimination of detention while insisting, “Remember, this is a crisis that Donald Trump has created through executive action.”

Wrong. Democrats have invited this invasion for cynical political reasons. And then they utterly denied a border crisis until they decided it was more advantageous to blame Trump.

Leftist judges are arguably doing even more harm. National Review reports, “U.S. District judge Marsha Pechman ruled Tuesday that the administration must allow asylum-seekers the opportunity to post bond and be released from detention while waiting for their claims to be adjudicated.”

The president’s new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, got it exactly right: “The district court’s injunction is at war with the Rule of Law. The decision only incentivizes smugglers and traffickers, which will lead to the further overwhelming of our immigration system by illegal aliens. No single district judge has legitimate authority to impose his or her open-borders views on the country.”

Yet Pechman’s judicial activism is by no means an isolated incident. Since Trump took office, federal judges have issued an eye-popping 37 nationwide injunctions to block his policies. That’s 10 more than were issued in the entire 20th century.

So while Democrat politicians and judges create this crisis, it’s worth pondering a fundamental question: Why do so many people of color from so many countries governed by persons of color risk everything to come to America — a country that has been declared evil, racist, and run by “old white men”?