When President Biden took office, he inherited what his first Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, described as “arguably the most effective border security in” US history.
The administration, however, quickly trashed effective Trump border policies like “Remain in Mexico,” just one of an estimated 64 executive border actions the president and his DHS secretary, the impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, have taken over the past 40 months.
Whereas the law says that Biden and Mayorkas must detain illegal migrants, the pair have instead released nearly all of them, more than 3.9 million by my conservative estimates.
Those releases encouraged even more foreign nationals to come here illegally from all over the globe.
That surge has overwhelmed border agents to such a degree that they couldn’t stop nearly 1.7 million others from entering illegally and evading Border Patrol apprehension.
A compliant media largely ignored this crisis until the Mayorkas impeachment and negotiations over a Senate border bill last winter pushed it to the fore.
The voters were duped, but only for a while.
In August 2022 polling, just 44% of registered voters described illegal immigration as a serious problem — during a year in which there were more than 2.2 million border apprehensions.
By March of this year, however, Americans figured out what was going on at the border, and immigration shot to the top of voters’ concerns, beating out inflation, the economy, crime, and drugs.
What to know about the Biden administration's "crackdown" on the border:
- President Biden announced an executive order that would shut down the US-Mexico border if illegal crossings reach over 2,500 for seven consecutive days.
- The order prevents migrants from applying for asylum during the shutdown period, but the restrictions will be lifted once crossings average 1,500 per day for seven straight days.
- Critics have pointed out that the border “crackdown” would still allow 1.8 million asylum seekers into the county if fully enforced.
- Border Patrol agents told The Post that the Biden administration plan is “too little, too late”
Even as the electorate grew increasingly angry about migrant crime and the costs Biden’s border releases were imposing on municipal coffers in cities and towns across the United States, the White House dithered, teasing various proposals while offering no new ideas.
Biden first tried blaming congressional Republicans for tanking that Senate deal — which would simply have codified and blessed the administration’s feckless border actions, not resolved the crisis — but the recent bipartisan defeat of that bill eviscerated a talking point few were buying anyway.
Now, five months out from the presidential election, Biden realizes that he’s out of talking points and has apparently decided he has no other option than to pretend to address a disaster he himself created.
He’s using a 72-year-old immigration authority — section 212(f) — to bar migrant asylum claims whenever CBP encounters a weekly average of 2,500 illegal migrants or more a day.
This limit is laughable, since between that and other programs Biden is still going to let more than 1.5 million people a year, higher than almost any other point in history.
But it’s even worse than that: His own Department of Justice has shown little willingness to defend that authority in suits brought by immigrants’ advocates, who attacked nearly identical (but more effective) Trump policies before liberal judges.
Will Biden’s lawyers change their tack now that his administration’s policies are in the dock?
Maybe, but don’t be surprised if this proposal is quickly blocked in the courts, at which point the White House will pivot and again blame congressional inaction for the parlous state of affairs at the US-Mexico line.
As I told Congress in March, the president already has all the tools he needs to secure the border. Trump did it, and so did Obama. The only difference is, they had the will. Congress can’t legislate that.
Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.