No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees.

Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department’s border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further. While appearing on Fox News Sunday, he told Chris Wallace that at least 12,000 of those same migrants were released into the country with a notice to appear in court, which is sure to be ignored by the majority of them, if history is any guide.

So to recap, thousands of migrants, who were not tested for COVID, and not vaccinated to anyone’s knowledge, were just released into the US and are most likely destined for urban city environments. This has been met with sympathetic shrugs from reporters, who have also made a point of highlighting when every mother or father of three who rejects the vaccine dies from COVID.

The Biden administration has offered American citizens an iron fist on vaccinations, to the point of instituting possibly unconstitutional mandates. His CDC demands that your children, as young as three years old, remain masked at their schools for all hours of the day, as well as at daycare. But when it comes to a refugee crisis, these mandates and demands suddenly dissipate. Either we are in a pandemic, where the Delta variant is burning its way across the United States and we must take every precaution to curb it, or we aren’t. Biden cannot have it both ways.

The sight at the border is first and foremost a public health crisis, one that neither our media nor the administration cared much about until they could deploy viral images from Twitter to smear border agents on horses.

The media and the administration are trying to have it both ways: shaming large gatherings like the Sturgis motorcycle rally and college football games, while remaining deathly silent on the large crowds of unvaccinated migrants. They are counting on playing the race card against anyone who dares to mention these hypocrisies. It’s a dishonest attempt to address the real optics of the situation.

America has always been a beacon for those looking for a better life. In the absence of a year-long pandemic, the conversation would and surely should turn to an open-border policy. But right now, the focus should be on public health and saving lives, or so we’ve been told.

Either we are in a pandemic or we aren’t. Strict rules remain as to who can and cannot travel here from Europe by airplane and through customs, American citizen or not. Some Democratic governors and mayors have re-instituted mask mandates. Why should the public listen any longer to an administration that lectures them on the dangers of being unvaccinated and the scourge of COVID variants, when they are also bent on flooding your community with unvaccinated and untested new residents?

Joe Biden is not merely failing in his vaccine messaging; he is failing the American people. The goal should be to shut down the virus, as we were told. That has to start by implementing strict border controls on everyone, whether it’s by airplane or by river crossing. Once that is taken care of, we can resume the age-old immigration debate.