Biden’s SOTU Boasts about Decreasing Illegal Immigration Were Fraudulent, Too

R ight before I read Jim Geraghty’s excellent Corner post on how President Biden’s State of the Union boasts about inflation were, well, inflated, I happened to read a report by Andrew R. Arthur, the stellar analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, on how Biden’s SOTU boasts about dramatic improvement in the crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border are also absurdly overblown.

In his speech, Biden brayed, “Since we launched our new border plan last month, unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent.” I will come momentarily to the administration’s new border plan, which, as I observed when Biden rolled it out, is both illegal and a political fraud. For now, though, let’s stick with what the president said. Even at face value, it was exaggeration. As Arthur runs the numbers, there was a decrease in unlawful migration from the four countries in question between December 2022 and January 2023, but it was a decrease of just 76 percent — and even that statistic makes the Biden administration’s immigration policies sound a lot more successful than they’ve actually been.

Because of Biden’s policies, illegal immigration is at astronomical, previously unseen levels, so any decrease, no matter how noticeable, is going to be a fall from unprecedented heights. And when you widen the time frame, comparing January 2023 with January 2021 (when Biden took office, and thus before his policies took hold) and January 2020 (before Covid shut down even most illicit travel), the picture starts to look a lot different from the one Biden painted. As Arthur shows, apprehensions from the four countries Biden mentioned were up 400 percent in January 2023 compared to January 2021, and an astonishing 1,275 percent compared with January 2020.

Now, let’s look at the numbers for all countries, rather than just the four that Biden cherry-picked. In total, there were about 156,000 illegal aliens “encountered” by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) personnel in January — 128,000 detained at the border, and 28,000 stopped at ports of entry. In the 15 years between May 2006 and May 2021, monthly apprehensions exceeded the January 2023 total of 128,000 only once — in May 2019, when slightly fewer than 133,000 encounters were recorded. That is, the January 2023 numbers Biden bragged about are historically horrible.

And how could they not be? In fiscal year 2022 (which ended last September), CPB agents apprehended over 2.2 million illegal aliens. As Arthur has previously shown, that is about 300,000 more illegal aliens in just a single year than were detained by CPB agents during the combined five-year period between the start of fiscal year 2014 and the end of fiscal year 2018. (See this New York Post chart, which makes the point graphically.)

Now, about Biden’s new border plan: It is not reducing the number of illegal aliens detained at the border; it is concealing the number of illegal aliens released into the country through a “parole” scam.

The scam works this way: Rather than trying to cross illegally at the border, aliens are now encouraged to arrange entry into the U.S. at CBP ports set up in northern Mexico. There, even if they do not have a valid asylum claim (which the vast majority do not, because a valid claim must meet a high evidentiary burden), they will be given “parole” so long as they can show a potential claim of credible fear of persecution in their home country (a very low standard).

As we shall see, the administration has no legal authority to grant such “parole.” Nevertheless, compliant and uninformed media are reporting on the plan as if it were legitimate and the “paroled” aliens were entering our country lawfully. The “parole” purports to authorize illegal aliens to work in the U.S. and lasts for two years, plenty of time to establish other ties (marriage, children) that will make it practically impossible to expel them — assuming that they show up for legal proceedings, and that the overrun system even schedules those proceedings in the foreseeable future. That is, Biden has presumed the unilateral power to amend statutory immigration law, in effect granting asylum to illegal aliens who do not meet the qualifications Congress has prescribed — aliens who are merely economic migrants, who could have applied for asylum in countries they passed through before arriving at a U.S. port of entry, and who do not have a cognizable fear of persecution in their native countries.

Biden’s parole program is lawless, which is why it is now being challenged in a Texas federal court by 20 states (including Florida, which has also brought a lawsuit in a Florida federal court). As I’ve explained a number of times, federal immigration law mandates that illegal aliens “shall be detained” from the time they are first encountered by federal authorities until their cases are disposed of (i.e., until they are either deported or granted asylum or some other statutorily authorized right to remain).

The law only provides two exceptions to this detention mandate.

The first exception enables the government to return aliens encountered at the border to a foreign country contiguous to the United States while their immigration proceedings are pending. This is the exception that led to former President Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, which Biden willfully dismantled.

The second exception (codified in Section 1182(d)(5)(A) of Title 8, U.S. Code) authorizes the government to parole aliens temporarily into the country, “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” (emphasis added). It is on this second exception that Biden purports to rely for his parole authority, but this claim is laughable. The administration does not even pretend that it is doing anything but mass parole; this is not case-by-case analysis of each alien, but release into the U.S. of thousands of illegal aliens each day. There is no “urgent humanitarian reason” to open the border: Again, these are economic migrants, and Congress has mandated that even aliens with potentially legitimate persecution claims must be detained. Finally, far from “significant public benefit,” the entry of so many illegal aliens is a public catastrophe for the states whose public-health, welfare, education, and law-enforcement resources are left to deal with them.

Biden is not reducing illegal immigration. He is pretending that illegal immigrants are legal because he has granted them “parole” — notwithstanding the fact that Congress has never and will never give him the power to grant it. He is not ameliorating the disaster he has created; he is merely moving the locus of the disaster from the border to the ports of entry. Consider, for example, the president’s false claim of a 97 percent drop in illegal immigration from the four aforementioned countries. As Arthur points out, there were about 22,000 such aliens encountered in January 2023. Of these, fewer than 12,000 were detained at the border; the rest were stopped at ports of entry. And that was actually a 42 percent increase over December 2022.

Biden’s shift of the crisis from the border to the ports is causing significant problems for the Mexican government (from which we need cooperation) as aliens from various countries overwhelm the ports in Mexican territory. The shift also continues the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe because it persists in encouraging aliens to make the perilous trip northward, notorious for violence, rape, child trafficking, kidnapping, and other abuses.

And here is the most perverse part: The president and his radical progressive base have turned things on their head. The point of having ports of entry is to provide for orderly management of our country’s generous legal immigration process. Congress’s objective in enacting immigration law is to discourage illegal immigration and expedite the removal of aliens who attempt to enter unlawfully. Now, however, Biden is converting the ports of entry into gateways through which tens of thousands of illegal immigrants can enter the country, squeezing out legal immigration and faithlessly undermining the execution of federal law.