Just nine days before the pandemic-era measure that allowed the government to more easily deport illegal migrants expires, Joe Biden is sending troops to the U.S. border. No, the detachment of soldiers is not going there to help, to the extent this is permitted by law, solve the crisis at the border. The administration insists that there is no crisis at the border, after all.
No, instead, the military personnel will be there to assist in the Biden administration’s ongoing fiasco of processing migrants into the country, with minimal paperwork or follow-up, even though they have no established legal right to enter or live in the United States. The troops will, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, assist “with some of the administrative tasks — such as helping process requests from asylum-seeking migrants in need of immigration court dates.”
To stem the human wave, the Biden administration has resorted to a program of “parole + alternatives to detention,” processing hundreds of thousands of illegal entrants into the country without a notice to appear in court. It is doing so because it is quicker than the hours-long paperwork process for a notice to appear, and the mission is to simply spread the problem of housing these migrants from the detention centers and shelters at the border, to spots all around the country.
The Biden administration’s policy of processing into the country so many claimants no matter how improbable their claim has created an immigration court backlog so severe that the first “notice to appear” in court can now have dates as long as a decade away, according to the AP. In recent weeks, the number of illegal crossings has shot up, and officials expect them to at least double as the Covid-era restrictions pass.
This ongoing surge is the Biden administration’s fault for dismantling the Trump-era policies that largely solved the last border crisis. At the root of this problem is the progressive mind’s unwillingness to seriously enforce the distinctions between U.S. citizens and foreigners with no right to enter the United States, an unwillingness that now expresses itself in various forms of defiance or corruption of U.S. immigration law.
This malign neglect of the border and these legal distinctions incentivize a long train of desperate migrants to come from all over the world. Thousands of Chinese immigrants are expected to cross — by foot — the treacherous Darien Gap this year to get into the U.S. illegally. They are joined by Haitians, even by Russians and Ukrainians. Some migrants are coached by unaccountable NGOs on the various loopholes that the Biden administration has opened, or on how to evade the plain meaning of the law with false testimony. Shamefully, many others are exploited by human traffickers and drug cartels. Women are raped, and many migrants die, while a wave of illegal fentanyl crosses over with illegal migrants. Even on this side of the border, the supply of people without legal status but needful of income has led to employers’ brazenly violating child-labor laws. Progressives think their unwillingness to enforce the law is compassionate. But this is a compassion that kills and corrupts.
Biden is now making the U.S. military and the Border Patrol into the legitimating authority that puts official-looking but often meaningless paperwork over what is fundamentally a criminal enterprise. They are processing into the country hundreds of thousands of people — eventually millions — who will now live in the legal shadows for a decade or longer.
There is a way to stop the wave of illegal migrants, to dry up the business for the smugglers, and to injure the business of the cartels — simply enforce our immigration laws, and effectively patrol our border.