Joe Biden may be headed for the beach, but don’t expect it to be a vacation from his problems. When the president got on the plane yesterday afternoon, the White House was frantically trying to clean up another mess of Biden’s making — this time on the southern border. In Del Rio, Texas, where more than 10,000 migrants are wading in the water on the U.S.-Mexico border, the president’s team can’t stop the flood of shocking images. It’s just one more snapshot in his photo album of failures.

The White House tried to bury the evidence, ordering the FAA to ground all drones around the bridge so that news outlets can’t capture video of the chaos. “It’s a two-week [flight restriction],” Fox News’s Bill Melugin explained, “for ‘special security reasons.’” The timing, the location, it’s all a little too coincidental, he agreed. “Fox News has been at the border for the better part of seven months now. We’ve been using the drone the entire time. It’s never been an issue. All of a sudden, the last 24 hours, we start showing these images at this bridge and a TFR goes up. We can no longer fly.”

But covering up the humanitarian crisis at the border will be impossible — even for these masters of distraction. The White House’s “nothing to see here” messaging hasn’t worked on the horrors of Afghanistan, and it’s not likely to reassure anyone on North Korea’s missile launch either. Then, of course, there’s the other baggage the administration is trying to ignore. “The inflation that was supposed to be short-lived continues to drag on,” Jim Geraghty points out. “…The pandemic that Biden pledged to shut down has killed more than 25,000 Americans so far this month… [and] the administration’s pledge to ‘follow the science’ has been dependent on the political convenience of what the science is indicating… As autumn arrives, they look naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads.”

And what is their solution? Pivot to hard-core transgender extremism! The world is unraveling at the seams, and the president’s priority is what it’s always been: outrageous social radicalism. The DOJ isn’t worrying about the constitutionality of vaccine mandate or whether the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff committed treason, it’s fighting pro-life laws and putting male rapists in female prison cells. As of Friday morning, that was the administration’s big announcement. The Biden team is on the verge of rewriting the “Transgender Offender Manual,” rolling back the Trump-era protections that protected women from having biologically male cellmates.

The Justice Department said it was committed to providing a “humane environment” — a goal that’s next to impossible, feminists say, when you lock up predatory men with females. But women’s safety has never been a real concern of this president, who is apparently determined to have “gender-affirming housing” no matter what risks it poses to others. Feminist groups have been ferociously opposed to the change, even going so far as to hold protests in states that have already moved ahead with mixed-sex cells.

The Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier tells one horrifying story after another about women who’ve been ordered to share cells with biological men (sometimes rapists) who weren’t even on hormonal medication. “They’re getting a full erection,” one female inmate told her. “So you’re locked in this room, 24/7, with a man and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you tell the police you don’t want to live with a man, or you’re afraid or whatever, you’ll get a disciplinary infraction. So you’re basically punished for being scared.” Rapes have gone up. Physical abuse is on the rise. Worse, every kind of criminal is mixed in together. “The people who’ve murdered their children are in the same room as the people who’ve stolen boxers from Walmart.” In Washington State, Shrier wrote, one male inmate who won access into the women’s prison under this accommodation was a serial killer of women.

Groups like WoLF, Sovereign Women Speak, and other radical feminist groups have been furious at the impact on biological women in jails, who are being housed with men against their will. “One woman with a history of suicide attempts broke her own hand beating on the door [for help], and asked to be placed in solitary, rather than sleep a single night next to her new male cellmate,” the organizations warned. Another woman “was punched in the face so hard by a new transfer that she couldn’t chew for three days. He was taken away and released back in a different yard with no restrictions,” WoLF’s legal director said. “He was her cellmate. She had to sleep with him.”

Holding signs like, “No Males in Women’s Jails,” they rallied at Washington State’s correctional facilities just last month demanding that leaders listen to common sense. One leader who refuses to? Joe Biden. Apparently, it’s not enough to throw Americans to the wolves in Afghanistan or kick soldiers out of the military over the COVID vaccine. The real injustice, as far as he’s concerned, is that violent men, who’ve committed unspeakable crimes, can’t sleep in women’s prisons. These are the atrocities keeping the president up at night. These are the agendas he cares about.

At one of the worst crisis points of the last half-century, “America isn’t back” under Joe Biden. It’s backwards. And the whole world is paying for it.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.