Time was, just a few weeks ago, when the Biden administration took COVID-19 seriously — so seriously, in fact, that it began discharging from the U.S. military all those young men and women who, for whatever reason, decided against getting vaccinated.

But now we know that the administration isn’t so serious about COVID after all. We know this because, as The Washington Free Beacon reports, the Biden White House “appears to have abandoned its effort to ensure all migrants apprehended by immigration authorities are inoculated against COVID-19, just a month after the White House said vaccines would be mandatory.”

As anonymous sources tell the Beacon: “Border Patrol officials in the Rio Grande Valley are exempting migrants from such countries as Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico from vaccine mandates. And migrants from Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela must only receive one dose of the vaccine before they are released into the U.S. interior.” We should note that these exempted countries have vaccination rates that are among the lowest in the hemisphere. Take Haiti, for example. According to Our World in Data, only 1.5% of Haitians are either fully or partially vaccinated.

Got that? Military members: Get vaccinated, or we’ll run you out of the service. Illegal immigrants: Come on across, and don’t worry about getting vaccinated.

As for these warriors, they’re among the most capable and most patriotic young people we have in uniform. We know this because we in our editorial shop happen to know some of them personally. As our Mark Alexander notes: “I am in contact with numerous outstanding career military personnel, combat-hardened Marine and Army officers with service records second to none, who are being forcibly separated because of Biden’s military vax mandate. The same is true of military veterans now serving in federal law enforcement capacities, the best of the best being forced out. And this despite most of them having already had the ChiCom virus and now sporting the natural immunity to prove it.”

Some of these unvaccinated warriors have filed suit, accusing their respective service branches of unfairly denying religious exemption requests. But to date, despite tens of thousands of requests having been filed, the Air Force has only approved nine, the Marine Corps has approved three, and the Army has approved one.

And so, the purge continues. Of 3,400 troops who’ve been involuntarily separated from the service so far, “about 70 percent have received general discharges,” the Military Times reports. “That characterization secures their veterans benefits and, in many cases, allows them to rejoin the military if they decide to get vaccinated.”

So at a time when our military is suffering greatly from a lack of morale and a lack of warfighting readiness, if these warriors want back into the service, they’ll need to compromise their principles and cave to the Biden administration’s authoritarians.

That’s some choice. And that’s some commander-in-chief.