I think it’s important for Republicans negotiating a supposed deal with Democrats over foreign funding and the border to remember one thing: The chaos at the American border is a policy decision. We’ve seen the numbers of encounters and crossings and parolings reach certain amounts month after month, depending on the Biden administration’s view of the politics. December will go on record as the month with the largest number of illegal crossings. But as the election year settles in, and Biden begins to talk tough on the border, the administration is already pressuring Mexico to stop the flow.
The Biden administration has all the tools and policies in place to control the flow at the border, and that’s what it’s done. The number of illegal entrants is the number that the administration wanted to achieve. Biden has taken Customs and Border Protection hostage, along with the law itself.
As Mark Krikorian writes today in Compact magazine:
Biden suspended Trump’s highly successful “Remain in Mexico” program, which required border-jumping asylum applicants to await their hearings on the other side of the US frontier. He repealed Trump’s rule requiring asylum-seekers to apply in countries they passed through before reaching the US border. He has dramatically slashed deportations of illegal and criminal aliens. He has abused the narrow emergency “parole” power to release (and give work permits to) more than 1 million illegal aliens. He has converted a border-traffic-management app into a tool for foreigners to schedule their illegal immigration through ports of entry. And more.
The result is precisely what the outgoing Team Trump warned the incoming Biden appointees about during the transition: an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration. Under this administration, there have been about 8.5 million “encounters” (to use the euphemism du jour) of inadmissible aliens at US borders. Some of those are repeat crossers, and not all got in. For a time, Biden partially kept in place the Trump-era Title 42 public-health order allowing the immediate expulsion of border jumpers. But more than 3 million illegal aliens have been taken into custody and then released into the homeland under Biden. In addition, another 2 million or more “gotaways” were detected but not captured by Border Patrol, mainly because overwhelmed agents have been reassigned from patrolling the border to “processing” illegal aliens into the country.
So, with that in mind, Republicans should not be negotiating against themselves — raising the number of legal entrants or giving the Biden administration more powers of discretion to avoid enforcing the law. Every Republican addition should be aimed at building policies and infrastructure that — in themselves — reduce the number of migrants who approach the border without visas or constrain the administration’s current discretion. One idea: Give the presidency the funds and discretion to build a wall. And if Biden won’t do it, I’m sure another candidate for the office will offer to do it instead.