Although he has yet to visit the border and witness firsthand the situation on the ground, President Joe Biden refuses to admit there is a crisis. In a sense, he is right. What is happening at the border is worse than a crisis; it is a full-blown, man-made catastrophe. This explains the president's decision to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the border. Of course, if Biden admits there is a crisis at the border, he will also have to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: He caused this disaster. The president's tap dancing around the issue makes Fred Astaire look like an amateur.

One of Biden's first acts as president was to blithely cancel everything the previous administration did to protect our borders. Having rushed into this imprudent step, he went even further. Biden invited the world to come, and they came — many of them wearing Biden T-shirts. With them came criminals, COVID-19 and congestion.

The Biden administration's open-border policies have created a "target-rich environment" for the world's largest criminal cartels. These drug and human traffickers now dominate the terrain on the southern side of the U.S.-Mexican border and have subdivided it into "transit zones" for controlling who gets into the U.S. illegally. Whole families and, especially, unaccompanied children — some younger than 4 or 5 years old — are forced to wear encoded wristbands to identify whether they have prepaid for the "right" to cross.

Unaccompanied children are especially vulnerable to being sold as contraband mules, sex slaves or indentured forced labor. Biden's "come on in" immigration policy is attracting thousands of unaccompanied children. It's no surprise human traffickers are drawn to our border like sharks circling a leaky life raft.

Human traffickers are not the only beasts feeding off the situation at our southern border. During Biden's short time in office, Border Patrol agents have arrested a steady stream of criminals attempting to take the president up on his invitation to enter the United States illegally.

These convicted felons are wanted for various crimes, including burglary, drugs, larceny, aggravated assault and sexual assault of a child. Unfortunately, these arrests typically come to naught because the Biden administration refuses to enforce the law and deport them. So blatant is Biden's refusal to enforce existing immigration laws that Florida's attorney general is taking legal action to require him to do his sworn duty as president.

While American citizens continue to endure the inconvenience of wearing masks in public, standing in long lines to be vaccinated and having their temperature taken before entering a government office, hospitals, doctor's offices and dental clinics, illegal immigrants are being allowed to enter America untested. Hundreds are then released into the population without testing or quarantine to spread COVID-19 and other diseases.

The potential spread of the coronavirus by illegal border-crossers is so acute that Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks has labeled our southern border "a dangerous new foreign pipeline for COVID-19." Brooks and several other Republicans have asked Dr. Anthony Fauci to take steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by illegal immigrants. Not surprisingly, Fauci, more adept at practicing politics than medicine, has ignored their request.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of Biden's border crisis is congestion. As of this writing, more than 14,000 immigrant children are packed like sardines in congested housing designed to shelter hundreds, not thousands. Worse yet, more than 300 of them have tested positive for COVID-19.

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to cover up this humanitarian catastrophe. The media is barred from entering these facilities. But leaked photographs are evidence of heinous misfeasance at best and perhaps malfeasance at worst.

It is now obvious to everyone except Joe Biden that the situation at our southern border is not just a crisis but a humanitarian disaster — a disaster of the president's own making. The border crisis is rapidly becoming the president's Watergate, and we all know how that ended.

Oliver L. North is a combat-decorated U.S. Marine, No. 1 bestselling author, and founder and CEO of Fidelis Publishing LLC and Fidelis Media LLC. Find out more about him at www.olivernorth.com. David Goetsch is a Marine Corps veteran, member of the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame, professor of business, Christian counselor and author of 76 books. Find out more about him at www.david-goetsch.com.