Joe Biden and his DHS sidekick Alejandro Mayorkas traveled to El Paso over the weekend to pretend to care about border security for three whole hours. That was fresh after giving a speech last Thursday in which he claimed he’s going to fix the crisis by … offering a plan to make it worse. He begins a summit in Mexico City with other North American leaders today on the topic of migrants.

“Biden Visits Southern Border Amid Fresh Crackdown on Migrants,” reads The New York Times headline. What “crackdown” would that be? Perhaps the scribes at the Times read a different speech or plan than we did. What Biden actually promised is that he’d drastically increase the number of asylum slots — all migrants from four particular countries have to do is let the U.S. know they’re coming — so as to put a patina of legitimacy on the current surge at the border.

The Times is complicit in the left-wing propaganda, reporting that “Democrats and human rights activists condemned his new enforcement plan as a ‘humanitarian disgrace.’” The Times wants you to think that means some sort of crackdown. In reality, leftist complaints are all part of the show. Biden needs them to cover for the fact that he is proposing what Andrew McCarthy calls “migrant laundering.”

What’s Biden’s plan to address the record 2.2 million arrests at the border last fiscal year? Or the minimum five million who’ve crossed illegally since he took office? He’ll simply reduce the number of Border Patrol “encounters” with illegal aliens by making those aliens “legal” before they ever arrive. It’s duplicitous and deceptive, and it’ll yield even more flouting of U.S. immigration law than the millions of illegals over the past two years have done.

Mayorkas gave the game away by saying the president’s policies will “incentivize a safe and orderly way and cut out the smuggling organizations.” Key word: incentivize.

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for one, is having none of it. “This [visit] is all for show,” Abbott argued. Indeed it is. Adding that it’s a “sanitized” itinerary, Abbott noted that Biden specifically “avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.” Illegal border crossings are up 260% in the El Paso Sector over the last fiscal year, but it sees only a tiny fraction of the problem.

Given that Biden caused the crisis, Abbott said the visit is “two years and about $20 billion too late.” Nevertheless, he met Biden as the president disembarked Air Force One and handed him a blistering letter.

“All of this is happening because you have violated your constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws,” Abbott wrote Biden. “You must,” he added, “comply” with the law regarding detention and paroling aliens, “stop sandbagging” enforcement provisions like Remain in Mexico and other expulsions, “aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry,” follow the law and congressional appropriations and “immediately resume construction of the border wall” in Texas, and, finally, “designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”

Abbott and other governors along the Mexican border represent the American citizens on the front lines of Biden’s intentional invasion. They have every right to be outraged by Biden’s dereliction of duty, and no three-hour photo op at the border is going to fix that. Neither is slapping the “legal” label on every border crosser and announcing “problem solved.”