Biden’s border ‘fall guy’ falls
Washington Examiner
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President Joe Biden’s border security policies are designed to fail. Instead of deterring immigrants from crossing the border illegally by turning them away, Biden has instead been focused on processing them and releasing them into the country as fast as possible. This is why illegal border crossings broke a record in Biden’s first year in office, then broke that record the following year.
When the official policy of the federal government’s largest law enforcement agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is to process immigrants into the country as fast as possible, it does not matter who the head of CBP is. That person is doomed to fail. So it came as a surprise to no one that CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus submitted his resignation to Biden last week.
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There was a little drama as Magnus’s final days played out. Apparently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had ordered Magnus not to attend a meeting of Border Patrol chiefs in El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday. When Magnus went to the meeting anyway, Mayorkas asked Magnus to resign Wednesday. Magnus then refused to resign. He finally did so late Friday, but only after suffering the indignity of being locked out of his Twitter account.
No explanation has been provided by the White House as to why they wanted Magnus out. But they did release a statement Friday commending Magnus for his “nearly forty years of service and the contributions he made to police reform during his tenure as police chief in three U.S. cities.”
Fully confirmed by the Senate only last December, Magnus did not even last a year in the job. He was clearly uncomfortable with the misinformation the White House asked him to peddle.
“When it comes to the border, I was never comfortable saying the border was secure,” Magnus recently said. That directly contradicts Mayorkas, who has testified before Congress that “the border is secure.”
What Mayorkas is really looking for in a CBP commissioner, according to John Sandweg, who served as acting director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama, is someone to act as a buffer between himself and the obviously failed immigration policies of the Biden administration. “You have the raging issues at the border, and it is not going to get any better,” Sandweg told the Los Angeles Times. “The secretary does not want to be the face of this.”
Before last Tuesday, there was a sliver of hope that a thorough drubbing in the midterm elections would cause Biden to rethink his catch-and-release policies at the southern border. Alas, that hope is gone.
“I’m an immigrant,” lifelong Hispanic Democrat Sarita Perales explained to the Atlantic about why she voted for a straight Republican ticket in 2022. “I’m also American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”
But while Republicans performed well on the southern border, voters thousands of miles away from the chaos prioritized other issues, such as abortion. Democrats were able to maintain control of the Senate and minimize their losses in the House.
Biden now has no reason to change course on immigration policy. He was already fading out Title 42 before a federal judge ended it this Tuesday. All he needs now is another fall guy to take the blame for his failed policies next year.
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