Joe Biden’s border policy is nothing to be proud of, and the administration apparently realizes it.
Body-cam video unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request captured a cop at an airport near White Plains, N.Y., asking federal contractors last year about the stealthy off-hours arrival of illegal immigrants. A contractor explains that “DHS wants everything on the down-low.” Another contractor says that no one wants it to get out that “the government is betraying the American people.”
Meanwhile, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin got footage of single adult males being processed through a nondescript location in Brownsville, Texas, to be flown to cities around the country. An ICE source told him that these kinds of releases have been taking place quietly since last spring.
The administration’s instincts at the border have been all wrong, but at least it has the sense to try to hide the full scope of its abysmal failure to enforce our laws and maintain good order.
Neither of the operations caught on the video should be happening. The New York flight involved unaccompanied minors, so the administration has portrayed it as a routine transfer in keeping with the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The Act protects unaccompanied minors trafficked into the United States. But as Mark Krikorian has pointed out, the minors being flown to New York don’t meet the definition of being unaccompanied, since they usually have an illegal-immigrant parent or relative in the United States who has paid to get them across the border. And they’ve been smuggled into the U.S., not trafficked for nefarious purposes.
It is understandable to want to reunite them with parents, but there is no reason to allow such families to stay here, let alone facilitate their gaming of our system.
The single-adult releasees are another matter. In a nod to reality, Biden preserved the Trump policy of using Title 42, a public-health authority, to immediately expel many migrants during the pandemic. But Mexico will only accept migrants from certain countries. The releasees are probably from places like Nicaragua and Venezuela and can’t simply be returned over the border. In theory, they could be enrolled in Remain in Mexico, the Trump-created program to require asylum-seekers to apply from Mexico, but Biden tried to end the program and, forced by a judge to re-start it, has been unenthusiastic about making use of it.
On top of all this, the administration has had no interest in creating more detention space to try to keep up with the ongoing border surge. So illegal immigrants that have no business being in the United States are released into the country, likely never to leave.
Every successful entry into the United States creates a permission slip for other migrants to try. Monthly Border Patrol apprehensions have been at record numbers for nearly the entirety of Biden’s presidency, topping 150,000 almost since the beginning. Now, it is no longer just Mexicans and migrants from the Northern Triangle coming but illegal immigrants from South American countries, Cuba, and Haiti, as well as places farther afield such as Russia, Turkey, and India.
Ultimately, Congress should change the rules to make it easier to enforce our borders. Until such time as Congress acts, though, Biden could drastically diminish the flow by reinstituting the programs he inherited from Trump. Instead, he’s opened a sluice at the border and hopes, through subterfuge, to keep people from noticing.