Jeffrey H. Anderson Border Bait-and-Switch The Biden administration is using misleading statistics and rhetoric to hide its role in perpetuating the migrant crisis.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/border-bait-and-switch
During the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz claimed, “Look, [border] crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.” Similarly, CNN reports, “Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020,” while a USA Today headline reads, “Illegal migration at the US border drops to lowest level since 2020.” These claims are true only if one doesn’t count it as a “crossing” when an illegal alien arrives at a port of entry along the border and is subsequently released into the United States.
Because the Biden administration is now funneling huge numbers of illegal aliens towards ports of entry with the help of its CBP One app, encounters elsewhere along the border are down. Yet, there are still far more aliens entering the country each month than there were under Trump—or even Barack Obama. The Biden administration continues to perpetuate the border crisis while simultaneously trying to mask that crisis with subtle policy changes and deceptive phrasing.
The primary reason we’ve had a border crisis for more than three and a half years is that the Biden administration—in a marked departure from every prior presidency—has refused to enforce federal immigration laws. Specifically, it has refused to enforce the requirement that asylum seekers be detained until their claims have been adjudicated. Instead, it has simply released them into the U.S. Knowing this, millions of migrants have arrived at our border, uttered the password “asylum,” and reaped the benefits of this administration’s failure to execute the laws.
The Immigration and Nationality Act declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes that such detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.” Yet the Biden administration has treated these requirements as discretionary, continually releasing aliens into the interior of the country. As U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell observes, this has been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.”
The Biden administration has refused to enforce federal immigration laws because such laws don’t comport with its notions of “equity.” In other words, this is a border crisis by design. On his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order on “equity,” covering “people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” Subsequently, the Department of Homeland Security quoted that passage from Biden and made clear that it was applying it “in the immigration context.”
In 2022, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether “it is the objective of the Biden administration to reduce—sharply reduce—the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.” Mayorkas, who was subsequently impeached by the House but not convicted by the Senate, wouldn’t answer yes. Instead, he immediately replied, “It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.” What Mayorkas meant was that the Biden administration doesn’t want illegal aliens to come to random places along the border but rather to ports of entry, from which they will be released into the United States. The Biden administration insists on calling this “lawful” entry because the aliens are not evading capture but are being let in. The law, however, says that those who enter the U.S. without proper documentation must be detained until their claims can be adjudicated, since they lack the documents required to enter lawfully. When CBS News’s Margaret Brennan told J. D. Vance and the television audience during the vice presidential debate that such migrants “have legal status,” she was simply parroting the administration’s groundless claim.
Before Biden, those wishing to enter the country illegally at least had to evade the authorities. Judge Wetherell notes that former U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who served under Biden, “testified that the current surge differs from prior surges that he [has] seen over his lengthy career in that most of the aliens . . . are turning themselves in . . . rather than trying to escape.” Ortiz said aliens are likely “turning themselves in because they think they’re going to be released.”
That’s an even a safer bet now, as the administration, true to Mayorkas’s stated objective, has implemented the CBP One program, which prevents illegal aliens from having to deal with the inconvenience of arriving at the border and then waiting to be let into the U.S. Instead, they make an appointment to appear at a port of entry. As Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge currently at the Center for Immigration Studies, puts it, the CBP One app allows migrants to “pre-schedule their illegal entries.” Indeed, the House Homeland Security Committee reports that 95.8 percent of those who have scheduled appointments through CBP One have been released into the U.S. This is true even though many, likely most, have no intention to appear at a future asylum hearing. DHS’s Office of Inspector General recently found that 358 aliens all claimed they were residing at the same four-bedroom house in the U.S. This apparently raised no flags, though the individuals had 266 different last names.
Unsurprisingly, while border encounters in between the ports of entry have declined in recent months (as the press has widely reported), encounters at the ports of entry have skyrocketed (which it has largely ignored). Encounters at the ports have risen from fewer than 3,000 during each of Trump’s last three full months in office to roughly 50,000 in each of the past 15 months (49,465 in August), a more than 1,600 percent increase. Overall encounters (whether between or at the ports) remain exceptionally high, eclipsing 100,000 during August (the most recently reported month), which amounts to more than 3,000 encounters per day. August was the third-lowest monthly total on Biden’s watch; it would have been third-highest monthly total on Trump’s.
From FY 2013 through FY 2020 (split between Obama and Trump), overall yearly encounters on the Southwest border never hit 1 million, and only once did they clear 600,000. Even with one month still to be reported, 2024 marks the third consecutive fiscal year under the Biden administration in which overall encounters have eclipsed 2 million. That’s like when Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in a season, shattering the previous record of 27.
Ultimately, however, the number of encounters isn’t the most important figure; it’s the number of people who either were released or escaped into the U.S. Comparing December 2023 with December 2020, the Border Patrol had 222,018 encounters under Biden and 71,141 under Trump—in his last full month in office—a ratio of roughly three-to-one. During those same two months, the Border Patrol released 191,782 aliens under Biden and 17 under Trump—a ratio exceeding 11,000-to-one. Even Ruth never shattered records like that.
In addition to releases, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that approximately 860,000 people escaped across the border in FY 2023 alone. These are people “observed making an unlawful entry, who were not turned back or apprehended, and who are no longer being pursued by the Border Patrol,” or “who crossed the border without being observed or detected.” That’s equal to 42 percent of the number of encounters with the Border Patrol on the Southwest border in FY 2023. Assuming the same ratio of escapes to encounters in other years, that would mean that about 3 million aliens through August have escaped into the U.S. under this administration.
In addition to escapees, the CBO estimates that in FY 2023 the number of aliens released into the U.S. was equal to 81 percent of the total number of aliens encountered on the Southwest border, whether at the ports of entry by the Office of Field Operations or in between the ports by the Border Patrol. Assuming this same ratio in other years, that would mean the Biden administration has released about 6.7 million illegal aliens into the U.S., through August. Adding the estimated 3 million who escaped across the border would bring the total tally of illegal aliens entering the U.S. under Biden to about 9.7 million—with four months of official statistics to go. That’s a staggering sum in less than four years, easily surpassing the combined populations of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston—America’s second-, third-, and fourth-largest cities.
The mainstream media and the Kamala Harris campaign claim that the border crisis (to the extent they admit it’s a crisis) is the product of factors beyond the current administration’s control. Getting control of the border, they claim, requires Congress to pass legislation—specifically, to pass the bill that was defeated on a bipartisan basis in the Senate earlier this year. Harris said in her recent 60 Minutes interview that “we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem.” In her Fox News interview on Wednesday with Baier, she refused to talk about any of the current administration’s executive actions on the border and focused laser-like on the bill. Walz offered a three-word solution during his debate with Vance: “Pass the bill.”
That bill, however, which Mayorkas was involved in crafting, would have made the crisis even worse. It would have legalized the Biden administration’s lawless refusal to detain illegal aliens, normalized unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, and tied the hands of future administrations. Indeed, the bill’s primary purpose, then and now, appears to have been to hide the truth from the American people about the origin of the border crisis—namely, the Biden administration’s refusal to detain asylum-seekers, as federal law requires.
Besides, the bill basically called for doing what the administration was apparently planning to do anyway. CBS News wrote that, even during a “shutdown” of the border, the bill “would require U.S. border officials to continue processing more than 1,400 asylum-seekers daily at these official border crossings.” Well, the administration is currently allowing 1,450 CBP One app appointments a day at official border crossings and has released 95.8 percent of those who have scheduled appointments. That amounts to an average of 1,389 new releases into the country per day, just shy of 1,400.
No bait-and-switch can hide the truth: the Biden administration just doesn’t want to keep illegal aliens out of the U.S. Indeed, Biden is such an historic outlier that Obama and Trump were much closer to one another on policing the border than either of them is to the current president. The Biden administration thinks “equity” and enforcement are at odds, so enforcement must yield. American citizens continue to pay the price.
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