Biden’s Broken Border

T here is something almost politically suicidal about President Joe Biden’s border policy. Currently that policy is to just watch our border break down, or intervene to stop anyone who might prevent a migrant from illegally entering the country. On Wednesday, the Justice Department sued Texas, challenging a state law that gave state police authority to arrest and turn back migrants, which was set to go into effect in March.

Joe Biden knows he is likely to face Donald Trump in a reelection bid, right?

Customs and Border Protection reported a record number of encounters with illegal migrants at the border — over 300,000 — in December. Calls for some kind of relief from the constant influx are coming from everywhere, from large blue cities such as Chicago and New York, to border towns like Eagle Pass, Texas, where up to 5,000 migrants are arriving every day. The New York Times reports that the small Texas town is spending more than $150,000 a month on ambulance services responding just to migrants, a cost that cannot be recouped through insurance. Meanwhile, New York City mayor Eric Adams is looking to sue Texas for $700 million because Governor Abbott keeps busing migrants to his city. Adams has kept New York a “sanctuary city,” where criminals are not interrogated about their status as illegal migrants or citizens, while at the same time begging the federal government to bail out the city for the costs of housing the new migrants in hotels, a policy he keeps up in order to prevent New York from hosting tent cities on its streets. Unsurprisingly, polls show that the immigration issue is rising in importance for voters.

Meanwhile, America’s border itself is crumbling, in a way. Almost every country depends at least somewhat on geographical features for its borders such as rivers and mountain ranges. One of the most important geographic impediments to illegal immigration has recently been conquered by migrants and human traffickers, the Darién Gap that separates North and South America. The mountainous jungle area was until very recently considered practically impassable; no roads run through it. The jungle is filled with deadly critters and bugs that sap the will and health of travelers who have to make it without directional signs or any nearby access to human civilization — plumbing or health-care facilities.

But in the past two years, the sheer number of migrants trying to pass through has brought in a critical number of human traffickers and social-media attention, so that the gap is now trampled and somewhat passable, with several garbage-strewn routes so well established that it has become a chief mode of illegal migration into the United States for Chinese nationals, who take advantage of laxer visa standards in South America and then make their journey by land northward. TikTok now has viral guides for passing through this area in several languages.

Democrats have committed themselves, almost without thinking, to this policy of malign neglect of the border. Having convinced themselves that active border enforcement is a species of “white supremacy,” they allow this disorder to fester, one that puts scores of thousands of people into the hands of human-traffickers and that will leave millions in the legal shadows in the United States. They have dug in as well, as evidenced by Democrats’ unwillingness to trade additional commitments to enforcing our laws at the border for more funding to the war in Ukraine.

This is all a problem of the Biden administration’s own making. Donald Trump did not really build a wall, but he did use executive orders and diplomacy to stop the border crisis that riled his administration. Stepped-up enforcement in the United States and Mexico, combined with the combative rhetoric of the president himself, did the work of dissuading potential illegal migrants from making the journey at all.

Joe Biden has recently begged Mexico to more vigorously enforce its laws, to dissuade migrant caravans from traveling through our southern neighbor as a land bridge. But to little avail. Very likely, Biden will try to just “message” his way out of the crisis.

But all Donald Trump has to do is show commercials of cut-together TikToks where the illegal migrants themselves explain how Joe Biden has made it easier to enter America illegally. Unlike any other candidate for president in American history, Donald Trump can point to one of the chief crises his country faces and say, “I fixed it before. I will do it again.”

Joe Biden has nobody to blame for this but himself.