One month after his administration arrested more than 300,000 illegal immigrants trying to cross the southern border, and released most of them into the United States to go wherever they wanted, former President Joe Biden made his case to reporters for legislation written by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).
“I’ve done all I can do,” Biden said before boarding Marine One on the White House South Lawn. “Just give me the power … Give me the Border Patrol. Give me the people, the judges. Give me the people who can stop this and make it work right.”
President Donald Trump saw the matter differently, responding in a social media post, “A Border Bill is not necessary to stop the millions of people, many from jails and mental institutions located all over the World, that are POURING INTO OUR COUNTRY …. I had the safest and most secure Border in U.S. History. I didn’t need a ‘Bill!’”
Five months into Trump’s second term, we can now definitively say Trump was right and Biden was wrong. According to the latest Customs and Border Protection numbers released this week, just 8,725 illegal immigrants were arrested trying to cross the southern border in May, and none, that’s right, zero, were released into the country.
Trump did not need legislation to accomplish this truly historic task.
It turns out that the key to securing the border was not more immigration judges, asylum officers, and ankle bracelets to track migrants released into the country. What was needed was the political will to detain and deport migrants quickly at the border and from within the country, so the message was delivered around the globe that economic migrants should not come.
Biden was not the only one falsely saying legislation was needed to secure the border. Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeated the falsehood in almost every media appearance he made, as did Lankford as he tried to pass his legislation (which would have made the crisis worse by legalizing Biden’s catch and release policies). Even the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board insisted that Lankford’s legislation was “crucial to reducing the current incentives for migrants to come to the U.S. border.”
Trump and the Republicans in Congress now want to build on what Trump has accomplished by giving him the resources to undo the historical mass migration Biden orchestrated during his four years in office.
The “one big, beautiful bill” contains more than $75 billion to build America’s deportation infrastructure, including $45 billion for new detention facilities and $10 billion to hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. (Lankford’s bill would have hired more Border Patrol agents to process illegal immigrants into the country, but not strengthen interior enforcement.)
There is no official number of illegal immigrants in the U.S., but according to the best estimate based on Census Bureau data, there are currently 15.8 million, a number that grew by 5.6 million on Biden’s watch. Thanks to Biden, the number of foreign-born people in the U.S. and the percentage of people who are foreign-born have never been higher. This is not what Americans want, and they did not vote for it.
Unfortunately, there is not much Congress can do to prevent a future Democratic president from reopening the border by not enforcing immigration law. But by passing Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” Congress can increasingly move toward undoing the damage of Biden’s illegal mass migration.