Title 42 hadn’t even ended on Tuesday when a jaw-dropping 11,000 migrants were caught crossing the southern border.
That record-setting number already exceeds the unheard-of 10,000 a day that DHS had predicted for when the pandemic-era measure allowing migrants to be excluded from the country expires at midnight on Thursday.
For comparison, Obama Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said that a thousand apprehensions a day overwhelmed the system. You know it’s bad when even President Joe Biden, who created this catastrophe and has minimized and lied about it from the beginning, says of the border, “It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”
It’s been chaotic for three years.
His administration ripped up the policies that the Trump team had arrived at to control the border on the assumption that if Trump favored them, they must be evil. So it trashed “remain in Mexico” and the “safe third country” agreements that kept bogus asylum-seekers out of the country. These foolhardy reversals, plus the widespread belief south of the border that Biden would be softer on immigration than Trump, drove a major influx from the beginning of the new administration.
The administration kept Title 42 because it realized that without it things would truly spiral out of control. Now that the authority is finally going away — and we never should have had to rely on a public-health edict for border enforcement — the scenes on the Rio Grande will get even more unbelievable and disturbing.
The administration’s approach the last several months has been to try to launder illegal immigrants through a mass parole program that allows them into the country before they cross illegally. This was mostly a PR measure, and had some success shifting numbers around. This is why White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, ill-informed as usual, felt justified in saying last week that illegal immigration had declined 90 percent, when the initial drop as migrants waited to see how the new program would work was already in the rearview mirror.
The idea was that the carrot of the parole program would be matched with the stick of enhanced enforcement, but enforcement has never been extensive enough to change the calculation of migrants assuming they have a good chance to make it into the United States.
Now, even the pretense of enforcement is breaking down. The administration has been releasing migrants with “notices to appear” that are almost meaningless. The new expedient is going to be simply dumping many of them on the streets. It will also be easier for illegals — coming here from a dizzying array of countries — to evade the authorities entirely.
Stopping this madness depends, first of all, on actually wanting to keep our sovereign border from becoming a bad joke. And, then, having rules and policies geared to keeping it secure. To that end, House Republicans are trying to wrangle the final votes to pass what would be the best immigration-enforcement bill ever to pass a chamber of Congress. It couples the security measures that have traditionally been in hawkish immigration bills — more resources, more border wall — with a codification of the Trump policies that kept migrants in Mexico or other foreign countries while pursuing asylum claims. It also includes an e-verify system to ensure employers are hiring legal workers, although this proposal has encountered opposition from Republicans from agricultural areas.
The bill, of course, has no hope of passing the Senate or getting signed by President Biden. It is, as they say, a “messaging bill,” but its message is all the more salient as the U.S. government flagrantly fails at one of its core duties.