His policies have led to a situation in which cartels prosper, immigrants’ lives are commoditized, and Americans suffer.
His policies have led to a situation in which cartels prosper, immigrants’ lives are commoditized, and Americans suffer.
I n last week’s presidential debate, Joe Biden claimed that the situation at the southern border is “better than when [President Trump] left office.” In reality, for both migrants and American citizens, it is far worse.
President Biden entered office in 2021 pledging to upend many of the Trump immigration policies, which he called “draconian,” “cruel,” “an assault on human dignity,” and “a stain on our nation.” Despite Biden’s claim that reversing those policies has made the situation at the border “better,” illegal immigration has spiked dramatically during his presidency, with millions of border crossings each year.
Among other things, President Biden ended Title 42, a policy instituted during the pandemic that allowed the U.S. to turn away more than 60 percent of migrants at the southern border, amounting to nearly 2 million people over a two-year span. He discarded the Trump “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in the U.S., rather than being released into the country while they wait. And on his first day in office, Biden paused deportations of noncitizens and halted all construction on the southern border wall.
Biden might believe that a porous southern border is a great service to humanity, but his policies have led to a situation in which cartels prosper, immigrants’ lives are commoditized, and Americans suffer.
Recently, I was in Cochise County, Ariz., shadowing local law enforcement and witnessing firsthand the crisis at the border. County law enforcement noted a “significant” and “noticeable” shift in the number of migrants they encountered between the Trump and Biden administrations. Until this trip, I had considered the cartels and illegal immigration to be two separate issues. In Mexico, cartel members routinely torture, rape, kidnap, and kill anyone who stands in their way, wreaking havoc on the Mexican population. And the cartels’ smuggling of fentanyl across the border has contributed to the deaths of 110,000 Americans annually. Fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds.
Though it was obvious that securing the border would drastically curtail the cartels’ ability to smuggle drugs that kill tens of thousands of Americans annually, I did not realize just how much illegal immigration, like drug smuggling, directly benefits the cartels.
The reality is this: Every migrant who crosses the southern border must pay the cartels. The cartels effectively control the entire border, and they will not allow anyone to cross without paying a fee. In Cochise County, local law enforcement noted that each migrant pays the Sinaloa Cartel $8,000. Some fees have been reported to be as high as $20,000.
In 2021 alone, the cartels made an estimated $13 billion from trafficking migrants across the border: $13 billion to some of the most corrupt, evilest, cruelest organizations on the planet. And that number has only grown in the years since, all because Biden refuses to secure the southern border.
The cartels treat migrants as objects, just another good to be smuggled across the border — nothing more, and sometimes worse. While attempting to cross the border, migrants have been beaten, tortured, extorted, and raped by cartel members. Rape has become so common, in fact, that many female migrants believe it is just “part of the payment” for crossing the border. Cochise County law-enforcement officers reported finding dozens of dead bodies annually, discarded by the cartels during their trek into the U.S., and showed videos of cartel smugglers displaying no remorse after directly causing these deaths.
For those who are fortunate enough to make it across the border unscathed, their situation often does not improve. Because many migrants cannot afford to pay the $8,000 fee in the first place, those who make it across can be trafficked into what authorities have described as “modern-day slavery,” through which they are forced to pay off the cartels. Surely this constitutes “an assault on human dignity” and “a stain on our nation.” But Joe Biden doesn’t seem to care.
Nor does he seem to care about his policies’ harm to American citizens. In the last few months, there have been multiple cases of illegal immigrants arrested for the brutal rape and murder of young women like Laken Riley. Just two weeks ago, Houston police arrested two illegal immigrants for strangling and raping Jocelyn Nungaray, a twelve-year-old girl, before dumping her body into a creek. Also last month, an illegal immigrant opened fire on NYPD officers, shooting two of them. In each of these cases, the perpetrators had two things in common: They were illegal immigrants, and they had been previously arrested and released because of Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies.
I am the proud grandson of immigrants, and I shudder at the thought of what my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would have endured had they attempted to enter across the southern border rather than doing things the right way. America is a great country, the greatest in the world. But even America cannot provide for millions and millions of people pouring across our border every year, and should not have to. Americans should not have to endure the rape and murder of our citizens by people who should not be here in the first place, or the ravages of fentanyl pushed by cartels.
Together with Biden’s rhetoric and weakness on the world stage, his immigration policies have encouraged a mass influx of migrants into the United States, leading to a situation that benefits no one. Though Biden seems unlikely to change course at this point, he should immediately readopt the policies instituted by President Trump. If not, the next president must take swift action to correct Biden’s border crisis so that more people don’t needlessly suffer and die.