Biden’s border fraud
Washington Examiner
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We noted yesterday in discussing Ukraine that President Joe Biden’s commitment to territorial integrity and democratic sovereignty does not extend to his own country. He has abandoned the southern border, encouraging record numbers of illegal immigrants to flood in from Mexico. Since taking office, everything he has done has made the crisis worse. He releases migrants into the United States where they can evade officialdom and their residence in America becomes a fait accompli.
This week, the Department of Homeland Security released a new asylum regulation that Biden claims will restore order. But it is so full of holes that it will spread more chaos and uncertainty in an already tumultuous region.
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The regulations released are due to take effect in May, which is when by miraculous coincidence when the Biden administration says the COVID-19 national emergency will end. Title 42 border enforcement, which is current policy, is based on the “emergency.” This new set of asylum rules is clearly designed to replace existing rules, and they are likely to be equally ineffective.
The month Biden took office, 78,000 immigrants were arrested after illegally crossing the border, and 82% of them were returned to Mexico under Title 42. Biden immediately punched loopholes in former President Donald Trump’s Title 42 policies, slashing the percentage of immigrants returned through Title 42 and boosting the numbers of immigrants released into our country.
The percentage processed through Title 42 had fallen to 50% by January 2022, while the number arrested rose to 154,000. By December 2022, just 20% were returned through Title 42, and a record 251,000 were arrested.
Biden reversed both those trends last month, with the percentage expelled through Title 42 rising to 41%, while the number arrested fell to 156,000. This shows how strongly expulsions and crossings are linked. The more immigrants released into the U.S., the more the illegal immigrants will come.
When Title 42 goes away in May, Biden will need a new method of denying entry to illegal crossers. He could resurrect Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” program, which restored order at the border. But that would involve admitting that Trump was right and Biden was wrong. So that obvious solution is a nonstarter.
Instead, Biden is enacting what the DHS is calling a “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” regulation that would create a presumption of asylum ineligibility for people arrested crossing the border illegally. This means that after a migrant is arrested, he or she would be brought to a processing center and interviewed by an asylum officer. If the officer determines that the migrant passed through a country where he or she could have applied for asylum before entering the U.S., he or she would be returned there. A migrant from Honduras who passed through Mexico would be returned to Mexico, for example, unless he or she could show that he or she applied and was denied asylum in Mexico.
This rule might work if Biden had not created huge loopholes. One is that the rule does not apply to unaccompanied minors or to adults traveling with minors. Even adults arrested by themselves can beat the presumption against eligibility by showing evidence that they face an imminent threat to safety or are a victim of “trafficking in persons.”
Given that most migrants have paid cartels for their passage and that the cartels rape and rob migrants, the task of convincing an asylum officer is likely to be easy. Biden’s new enforcement regime could end up being even weaker than the existing system.
Unfortunately, Congress has limited leverage to make the executive branch enforce immigration law. But it should at a minimum demand better information from the administration about who is being released into the U.S. and where they are going.