We will have more in our editorial on Tuesday on the “Biden border bailout bill,” but I saw this headline from Politico and had to laugh: “Detention and that border ‘shutdown’: What’s really in Biden’s bipartisan immigration deal.”
In the article, Jennifer Scholtes and Caitlin Emma report that the Senate border bill has “$8 billion in emergency funding” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including “more than $3 billion for increased detention capacity.”
OK, so how many migrants does the bill plan on the Department of Homeland Security detaining? It’s right there in the bill on page 82: “46,500 individuals.”
But is 46,500 a lot? Nope. Not historically. As recently as 2020, then-President Donald Trump asked for the capacity to house 60,000. President Joe Biden lowered that number to 32,500 for 2022 and all the way down to 25,000 for 2023.
In other words, Biden has been steadily undermining DHS’s ability to detain migrants all along.
And what has Biden been doing with migrants who are caught illegally crossing the border instead of detaining them? Releasing them into the country through ICE’s “Alternative to Detention” program.
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The “Biden border bailout bill” puts this “Alternative to Detention” program on steroids, authorizing Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to put every migrant in the program who asks to be put. What this means in reality is that instead of being detained by ICE, migrants will be released into the country with only ankle monitors to slow them down.
Does that sound like “tough” border enforcement to you?