Dispatches from an Alternate Reality

The New York Times dropped in at the southern border late on Tuesday night and found that “the situation looks very different these days.” In a meta-analysis of the border crisis, reporter Hamed Aleaziz noted that the “headlines about surging border crossings” or migrants descending on America’s struggling urban centers have disappeared, which is a bit different from the observation that the underlying crisis is gone. A casual survey of the Times’s coverage of the ongoing exigency surrounding America’s blooming migrant population suggests that neither the crisis nor the headlines are, in fact, “gone.”

Nevertheless, Aleaziz can credibly report that there has been a “dramatic drop in border crossings” as measured by migrants’ contacts with border enforcement. That decline “came after a Biden administration policy seen by White House officials as a major success for an administration that has spent three years fighting Republican attacks over its handling of surging border crossings.”

Readers who have not followed the crisis closely might conclude from this sequence of events that the border exploded for no particular reason and that Republicans cynically hectored Biden about circumstances over which he had no control. Indeed, the Biden administration’s plucky, hyper-competent bureaucrats are the heroes of this story.

The border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation.

Since then, the results have been clear: Border arrests are down, asylum claims are plummeting and fewer newly arrived people are being released into U.S. communities.

Given this incredible success, Aleaziz wonders confused, why isn’t Kamala Harris “talking about it more in her run for the presidency?” Maybe she’s worried that border crossings will spike again. Perhaps she doesn’t want to give ammunition to Republicans who “misleadingly” deem her Biden’s “border czar.” Or maybe she just doesn’t want to antagonize the Democratic Party’s immigration doves. Who can say?

Maybe, just maybe, the decline in recorded contacts at the border is attributable to a policy that Joe Biden insisted he was unable to pursue — even as the GOP insisted that he already possessed all the power he needed to pursue it.

The president and his allies had maintained for months leading up to this past June that the administration was “out of options” when it came to managing the migrant crisis. Biden needed Congress to grant him the authority to close the border after daily crossings surpassed an arbitrary figure, tighten criteria for asylum-seekers, and quickly deport newly arrived migrants who don’t meet those criteria. Many Republicans disagreed. Regardless of the merits of legislation that would codify border- and immigration-enforcement guidelines that are currently subject to presidential interpretation, the GOP balked at the notion that Biden needed congressional imprimatur to secure the southern border. All available evidence suggests they were right.

Why isn’t Kamala Harris talking about Biden’s success at the border? Because to do so would be to ratify the GOP’s arguments. That seems like the most logical explanation, but it’s one that greatly diminishes the supposed accomplishment about which Biden and Harris should be crowing.