RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Biden administration’s bulletin board, also known as the Washington Post, featured an article last week headlined: “Biden takes heat for border measures, but illegal crossings are down.”

Various other news outlets echoed this theme, using terms such as “plunged” and “plummeted,” to describe what is, in fact, a record-high number of illegal crossings in both January and February.

How did the administration pull off this “plunge”?

Basically, by narrowing the focus and by redefining what counts as an illegal border crossing.

“The Biden administration has started using its port parole program shell game to feign ‘lawfulness’ and distract from the true numbers of illegal aliens entering the U.S. each month,” reports the Daily Signal.

Joe Biden started this parole program for Venezuelans, and in January expanded it to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. People from those nations can get into the country – without a visa – if they show up at a port of entry and agree to some minimal rules under a supposed two-year parole.

“The administration has directed would-be illegal aliens of numerous nationalities to use the CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry, where they will be paroled into the country,” the Daily Signal explains.

The Customs and Border Patrol reports that illegal crossings by people from those four countries fell from 84,190 in December to 2,050 during February.”

Well, no kidding. Why cross illegally when you can tap an app and get into the country without having to follow the rules to enter legally?

“The administration calls this process a ‘lawful pathway,’ but mass paroling tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens through the ports make neither the process, nor the aliens using it, lawful,” notes the Daily Signal.

Using this method, Biden could easily get the number of illegals crossing to zero. All he has to do is to declare that anyone crossing isn’t doing so “illegally,” just “differently.”

How long this parole program will last is anyone’s guess. Twenty states are suing the administration, claiming that it’s an unconstitutional end-run around duly passed border laws.

Even if Biden’s efforts were restricting the flow of illegals across the southern border, they aren’t reducing the total number of illegal crossings. According to Customs and Border Control, agents reported a total of more than 212,000 “encounters” with illegals this February, which is 20,000 more than last February and 157,000 more than in February 2020.

The reason is that there’s been a surge in illegal crossings across our northern border. Over the past five months, 68,783 came down from Canada illegally, twice as many as the year before.

“The migrants are mainly from Mexico, and they can travel to Canada without visas before they cross illegally into the U.S.,” reports NBC News.

Meanwhile, the same day the White House was bragging about the drop in illegal crossings at our southern border, U.S. Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz was telling lawmakers that the government does not have “operational control” of the border. This directly contradicts what Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly told Congress.

Ortiz told lawmakers at this hearing — all of them Republicans because Democrats boycotted — that the CBP’s mission under Biden isn’t border control, it’s now a “processing enterprise.” He said “morale is at an all-time low” among border patrol agents.

Like everything else that comes out of the Biden administration these days, the claim that he’s getting serious about controlling the border is a big fat lie.