The Senate’s border security farce
Washington Examiner
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More than 9,000 immigrants were arrested for illegally crossing the southern border this past Thursday. To put that number in perspective, President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson once testified that any more than 1,000 arrests a day was a crisis.
What is the word for a crisis, but nine times as bad? That is what President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies have created.
It is understandable that Republicans in Congress want to do something to mitigate this epic policy disaster. The real costs of mass immigration are being felt in communities nationwide as city after city begs for relief from the pressure of housing, feeding, clothing, and educating immigrants.
Then there is the cost to communities from fentanyl being smuggled in amid the chaos caused when Border Patrol agents must spend all their time processing immigrants into the country instead of catching drug smugglers. After Oct. 7, the danger from international terrorist organizations using Biden’s border chaos as an opportunity to infiltrate our nation cannot be overlooked either.
Something must be done, but there is a real danger of doing the wrong thing and making the problem worse. Unfortunately, it appears that is what some Senate Republican negotiators are doing on border security.
Specifics have not been released, but reports indicate that in exchange for $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, Republicans would get $14 billion for “border security” and reforms to the asylum process that allegedly would help bring order to the border.
But neither the spending nor the policy changes would discourage immigrants from coming and would probably make the problem worse.
The lion’s share of the $14 billion Biden has asked for on border security would be spent on processing immigrants into the country faster and bailing out Democratic-controlled cities bankrupted by mass immigration. Republicans should not bail out Democrats for their policy mistakes. If Democrats want to turn their communities into sanctuary cities for immigrants, they must be made to bear the costs of that decision. No bailouts for sanctuary cities.
Tweaks being proposed to the asylum system would also be no help. Some Democrats are willing to tighten the initial screening of immigrants who claim asylum when they are arrested crossing the border. On the surface, this sounds like it might help. If more immigrants were turned away, fewer would make the dangerous journey to come.
But the border is so overwhelmed that most immigrants arrested aren’t even being interviewed for asylum status before being released into the United States. A quick look at the data for the most recent month available makes this point. In October, 188,778 immigrants were arrested by Border Patrol for illegal entry. Of that 188,778, only 28,334 were placed in “Expedited Removal” where they would have been interviewed by an asylum officer.
Some 20,000 of that 188,778 voluntarily returned to their home country, another 11,000 were detained by Border Patrol, and 6,000 were deported based on prior orders of deportation. But the vast majority of those arrested — 120,175 out of 188,788 — were simply released into the U.S. without having to speak to an asylum officer or establish any credible fear of persecution in their home countries. Biden simply released them among us using his parole authority.
Tightening the asylum standard would only have an impact on those 28,000 immigrants placed in “Expedited Removal.” It wouldn’t touch the 120,000 released into the country for “humanitarian” reasons.
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The only way to force Biden to stop releasing hundreds of thousands of immigrants this way every month is to force him to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy he abandoned. Only by stopping immigrants entering the country will future flows be deterred.
But returning to “Remain in Mexico” is a nonstarter for Democrats because they reflexively do the opposite of anything done by former President Donald Trump. If Democrats don’t want to fix the policy causing the crisis, their cities get no money. Without substantive policy change, throwing money at the problem will only make it worse.