Only voters can restore order to the southern border
Washington Examiner
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The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in the case of Arizona v. Mayorkas, an effort by 19 Republican-controlled states to force President Joe Biden to continue using emergency powers under Title 42 to deport immigrants arrested after illegally crossing the southern border.
The problem is, as the December border apprehension numbers show, it doesn’t matter what the court decides — Biden is already phasing Title 42 out of use.
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When Donald Trump was still president in December 2020, the number of immigrants arrested after illegally crossing the border was 73,994, and 84% of them had to go back to Mexico or their home country.
By December 2021, after Biden punched loopholes through Trump’s Title 42 policy, the number of immigrants arrested more than doubled to 179,253, and only 46% were deported.
Biden has continued to ramp down the use of Title 42, and last month, a record 251,487 immigrants were arrested after illegally crossing the southern border. Just 20% of them were returned to Mexico or their home country. The pattern is clear: More illegal immigrants are coming, and few are being denied entry.
Those not denied access to the United States through Title 42 were processed through Title 8, the nation’s immigration code. Migrants know that as long as Biden is president, all they need do is claim they are scared of persecution at home, and they will be released into our country to go wherever they want. As long as they don’t commit a felony, Biden will make no effort to track them down and deport them, even after they lose their asylum claim, which most will.
This huge reduction in the use of Title 42 under Biden, from 84% under Trump to just 20% last month, is being perpetrated when Biden is supposedly under court order to keep Title 42 in place. There is an upper limit to what courts can do to force the executive to enforce the law. Biden wants to keep letting hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers into the country every month, and there is not much the courts can do to stop him. Or Congress either.
It is up to voters to stop him and his party.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are working on legislation to “end Biden’s border crisis.” This is an admirable goal, and Republicans should pass legislation through the House, but there is no chance the Senate would pass the House bill or that Biden would sign it.
Biden has the power he needs to end his border crisis, but he doesn’t want to. Section 212(f) of Title 8 gives him authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens” if he decides it would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” for them to continue pouring in. But Biden and the open-border ideologues who control the Democratic Party see nothing “detrimental” about millions of people entering the country illegally each year against the wishes of the public and of voters. That’s why it is up to voters to stop them at election time.
Biden and the Democrats are mildly embarrassed by how the border chaos looks, which is why their “solution” is to throw more money at the problem to speed the migrants into America faster.
Until the voters put a president in the White House who is willing to enforce existing immigration laws, the border crisis will only get worse.