By William P. Hoar
Article Source

There was a time, not that long ago, when it paid political dividends for both Republicans and Democrats to love a wall — or at least to advocate for the building of a “fence” on the nation’s southern border.

For instance, take a guess about the identity of this apparent U.S. hardliner, discoursing on the need to counter spiraling illegal immigration:

It makes sense that no great nation can be in a position where they can’t control their borders. It matters how you control your borders … not just for immigration, but for drugs, terror, a whole range of other things…. I have been arguing for more protection at the borders…. You have to have a significant increase in security at the border, including limited elements where you actually have a fence.

Pretty tough chauvinist, eh? Of course, being a politician, he did equivocate a bit — dealing with the fencing by hedging — saying he was not for “a fence that runs for 3,000 miles like some folks are talking about, but there are certain places — you can go over and under a fence, but you can’t take 100 kilos of cocaine over and under a fence. And, when you have limited places where fences are in populated areas, you force these drug dealers and others around, making it easier to apprehend.”

Yep, as you may have guessed, the speaker was Joe Biden. His remarks came at a presidential campaign stop in Winterset, Iowa, in August 2007 (a few months before he placed fifth in the state’s caucuses and ended his presidential bid).

This pledge serves as a reminder that if you lie to people to get their money, it is called fraud. However, if you lie to them to get their votes, that’s politics.

One wonders if Biden even remembers this. If so, he undoubtedly wishes others would forget it. Eventually, of course, this longtime pol did wind up in the Oval Office, albeit without his earlier vows — thus standing firm, in midair, on both sides of a vital issue.

And, since he assumed office, we’ve been afflicted with what amounts to open borders.

Approximately four million illegal immigrants crossed the border between the time Biden took office until the middle of this year. For context, consider that is about four times the entire population of the Biden’s home state of Delaware. That number — rising daily — includes around 3.2 million illegal aliens that Customs and Border Protection has apprehended, as well as at least 800,000 “gotaways” who have escaped undetected into the United States.

After Biden reversed his predecessor’s policies, there was, not surprisingly, a migrant surge. The president first excused it as being “seasonal.” Much like “temporary” inflation, it was more than that.

And the Biden team has made matters worse — seemingly on purpose. During fiscal year 2021, the administration reduced the prosecutions for those making illegal crossings by about 80 percent. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — whose mission is to protect our nation from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety — has been handcuffed due to approximately 90 percent fewer deportations. And the administration is granting a “de facto amnesty,” putting the nation on track to one million more illegals by 2024 (more on that below).

Comparisons between the Biden and Trump administrations are stark. During Biden’s first year in office, overall total deportations fell 70 percent. Drilling down in statistics (that were only released after a Freedom of Information Act request), according to ICE records, removals of criminal aliens fell 62 percent in 2021 (to 39,149), compared to 103,762 in 2020. In 2019, 150,141 convicted criminals were removed by ICE.

Not too long ago, the International Organization for Migration took note of the 700-plus deaths on the U.S. southern border in 2021; the UN group termed it the most fatal land crossing in the world.

DHS Head Boasts of “Secure” Border

Our sovereignty and more are affected by this virtually unchecked flood of illegal aliens. Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, rightly has blasted the “disaster unfolding on America’s southern border since 2020,” calling it a “humanitarian tragedy and a threat to our national security.” As she summarized this summer in a piece for Stanford’s Hoover Institution:

Hundreds of migrants have died while trying to cross the border, and federal agents have apprehended tens of thousands of unaccompanied children. Fentanyl trafficking has skyrocketed, with agents confiscating some 11,000 pounds of the drug (each pound of which can kill over 200,000 people).

Here’s a footnote on fentanyl — which is the top killer of 18-to-45-year-olds in the United States: During a recent visit to the southern border, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a medical doctor, pointed out that Communist China is “sending fentanyl precursors to Mexico for the cartels to develop and then traffic across the border.”

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of reported fentanyl-related deaths jumped 56 percent; between 2020 and 2021, the number of deaths linked to the synthetic opioid was bumped another 23 percent – going from about 58,000 deaths in 2020 to more than 71,000 the following year.

There are also direct deaths on the frontier because the border is so porous. This includes the 50-plus who were left to die in the Texas heat in June. They were found in the back of an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio, in what became the deadliest human-smuggling incident in U.S. history.

While the Biden administration claims otherwise, the border is effectively open. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed (with a straight face, at the Aspen Security Forum) that the southern border “is secure.” The secretary made the contention amid multiple consecutive months of 200,000-plus migrant encounters.

Border Patrol agents couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Nor could Representative Mayra Flores (R-Texas), who not long ago won a special election in a competitive (historically Democratic) border district. She responded to the Mayorkas “secure” claim angrily, calling this “not only intellectually dishonest but also an outright lie.”

In a July interview in Spanish with Breitbart News, Flores commented that the criminal organizations from Mexico are the only ones benefiting from the current Biden-assisted border crisis. The cartel profits are indeed immense — from both drug and human smuggling. A New York Times article on July 26 (entitled “Drug Cartels Are Making Billions of Dollars Smuggling Migrants”) has details on how that smuggling has produced revenues of $13 billion, up from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security investigations.

Representative Flores, the first Mexican-born woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, discussed the issue with Breitbart:

“Unfortunately, we have a border that [is under the] control of criminal organizations,” Flores said, referring to the operational control along the border by the Gulf Cartel and the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas. Currently, the Gulf Cartel operates one of the most active human and drug trafficking corridors in Flores’s district. “It is a sad reality, but no one can cross the border into this country without having to pay thousands of dollars to criminal organizations.”

Little wonder that a Quinnipiac Poll not long ago revealed, among other findings, that an overwhelming 69 percent of Hispanics have expressed disapproval with how the White House is handling border issues.

Such developments deserve a lot of attention, nationwide, wouldn’t you say? Well, not if you are running major television networks and are trying to downplay the disastrous actions of the Biden folks. Consider what was being covered between July of 2021 through June of 2022 — a period when there were more than 2,361,000 border crossings. The Media Research Center did the homework, watching all the evening news shows on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News — and found a mere total of 146 minutes of coverage on the issue. During that entire year, the three network evening newscasts spent “less than one percent on the border crisis,” according to MRC’s NewsBusters.

On the one hand, Americans got wall-to-wall coverage about an incident in September 2021 involving Haitian migrants on the Texas-Mexico border who were supposedly “whipped” with horse reins by Border Patrol agents. Immediately, the president insisted that they were “strapped.” Biden promised that the agents “will pay,” and Vice President Kamala Harris conjured up strained comparisons with abuses under slavery.

On the other hand, there was considerably less coverage when a nearly 10-month investigation determined that no criminal conduct occurred. (Several Border Patrol agents still face potential disciplinary action; one, if you can believe it, seems to have used insulting language against the would-be border jumpers.) Yes, morale is down among Border Patrol agents, as even Mayorkas has acknowledged.

There’s good reason to be depressed. Speaking about the overwhelmed Del Rio (Texas) station, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies has described how the hordes of apprehended border-jumpers there were being loaded into buses by the feds to be sent to states across the nation. Most, as Bensman wrote not long ago, were being “released on a presumption that they’ll eventually apply for asylum; the Biden government stopped long ago even pretending to follow lawful processes. It’s an honor system now.” The wishful assumption is that the illegal aliens will report one day to their new local ICE offices.

Law Seen as “Irrelevant”

The Washington Examiner has reported that “federal prosecutors are quietly dismissing stacks of cases” against illegal aliens, citing leaked information. A political appointee reportedly has ordered that no action will be taken against illegal border crossers who arrived before the election in November 2020. According to the Examiner, attorneys from ICE “have begun to throw out tens of thousands of the 2 million backlogged cases in immigration court.” In the words of one ICE federal prosecutor, “this is a de facto amnesty.”

The law is being sabotaged from within.

And we are referring to the law as passed by the U.S. Congress. As explained by Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies:

Not only does the Immigration and Nationality Act require DHS [Department of Homeland Security] to detain illegal entrants, but the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (which then-Sen. Biden (D-Del.) voted for) requires Mayorkas to gain “operational control” — defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, [and] other unlawful aliens” — at the Southwest border.

However, Mayorkas and his senior officials have been welcoming record numbers of illegal immigrants at the border, notes Erin Dwinell of the Heritage Foundation. This refusal to protect the homeland, writes Dwinell, has caused “states such as Texas to take unprecedented measures to protect their residents.” Then these officials “take it a step further by refusing to detain or deport illegal immigrants once they are here. (Mayorkas has told ICE ‘that unlawful presence is not grounds for removal.’)”

Indeed, as noted in another Washington Examiner piece in July, under the Biden administration as many as “70% of Border Patrol agents are off the line,” being kept busy “getting illegal crossers registered, then arranging travel to their preferred U.S. destination at taxpayer expense.”

Here is a bit more about what we mean by sabotage. According to the above Heritage account, a highlight of the

policy alert states: “a noncitizen’s location during the statutory 3-year or 10-year period and the noncitizen’s manner of return to the United States during the statutory 3-year or 10-year period are irrelevant (emphasis added) for purposes of determining inadmissibility under INA 212(a)(9)(B).”

You read that right: The written law is “irrelevant” to the Biden administration.

A policy guidance dated June 24 reinterprets the law. In effect, says Dwinell, it waives “explicit language in the Immigration and Naturalization Act stating that illegal aliens who were previously ‘unlawfully present’ for at least six months are barred from returning to the United States for three or 10 years after ‘departure or removal.’ In short, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will approve of prior lengthy illegal presence.”

Meanwhile, ICE is being drastically defunded, as the Biden team continues to defang it. This should not be a surprise; Biden has acknowledged that he’s trying to abolish ICE.

The Republican governors of Texas and Arizona, as a result, have been giving Democrat-run Washington, D.C., and New York City a taste of what happens when federal policies lead to a migrant onslaught — busing them some border jumpers. Don’t cry for the stressed mayors. Those leaders have supported the Biden team’s disastrous policies on the southern border; those Democratic cities, especially when Trump was president and deporting many border jumpers, proudly boasted that their “sanctuary” jurisdictions wouldn’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

These days, Muriel Bowser, the D.C. mayor, is wailing that her city has been hit with a “humanitarian crisis.” Unmoved, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, commented in the New York Post about her letter to the Department of Defense, in which Bowser

said the arrival of 4,000 people over the past three months from the Southwest border had “overwhelmed” her capacity to respond.

Wow, 4,000 illegals, you say? Over three months?

It turns out that in June the Border Patrol in Texas apprehended more than 4,000 border-jumpers each day. [Emphasis in original.]

By the way, the request for National Guard reinforcements was denied.

Agents Used for Processing, Not Patrolling

Naturally there has been political pushback since the Biden administration decided to make the drug cartels great again. As mentioned above, several Republicans on the House Select Committee on Intelligence not long ago traveled to the border to examine the national security issues involved. They arrived not long after Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’ literally unbelievable claims about the border being “secure.”

Representative Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the ranking member on the committee, took direct issue with that assertion on Fox News Digital. Said Turner:

We met with the FBI, the Texas Department of Safety, the Border Patrol. What’s clear as we stand here on the border is that the border is not secure. Thousands of people are being apprehended a day, others cannot even be captured. The amount of drugs, even guns, that go across the border, cash, illegal activity, human trafficking. The toll that’s happening on people who are crossing this border is extraordinary.

The congressman also said, “You have people who are on the terrorism watch list, people who are known terrorists, there is a threat of them crossing the border.” In fact, an examination of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics for FY 2022, as we write, shows that 56 people on the terror watch list have been apprehended trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry since the fiscal year that began last October.

Of course, this does not show potential terrorists who were not caught. That’s also the case of the recorded statistical “gotaways.” In an interview this summer with The Federalist, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott (currently a senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation) said the real number is undoubtedly much higher. Per Scott: “The 500,000 that are documented, they do exist. But by leaving hundreds and hundreds of miles of border completely unpatrolled for days or weeks at a time, which is what’s going on currently because most agents are in processing, that number is very, very, very artificially low.”

Don’t look for dramatic improvements with the current administration and its policies. True, when political exigencies demanded it, word did come down from Washington that the “Yuma Gap” would be closed by the Biden administration. At some point. (As critics have noted, this came 18 months too late and after about 345,000 migrants.)

This change led to some rather clumsy sidestepping by the White House’s press secretary — who had the job of squaring that announcement with Biden’s earlier promise, to wit: “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.” Pressed, Karine Jean-Pierre ducked and bobbed, saying, “So, we are not finishing the wall, we are cleaning up the mess the prior administration left behind in their failed attempt to build a wall.”

Well, one supposes that will have to do for a second-story man: Nobody will ever believe his first story.

The fact is that officials in the Biden administration won’t even carry out their designated duties. Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow of law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, has blasted the Mayorkas assertion that deterring illegal entrants is no longer the administration’s border policy, claiming that it is now focusing on facilitating asylum claims.

Yet, as Arthur writes in a CIS article, Congress does require that the Department of Homeland Security detain illegal migrants. “Despite that fact,” he continues,

alien detentions have plummeted throughout the Biden administration, ICE detention sits empty (at a cost of more than $41.5 million per month), and the president is asking Congress to cut detention funding in the FY 2023 budget — despite the fact that record numbers of migrants are surging across the Southwest border.

Prosecutions of illegal entrants have also dropped under the Biden administration, and … the president is fighting in federal court (thus far successfully) to end Remain in Mexico — all while the Biden administration is issuing plans to rubberstamp migrants’ asylum applications and expedite their work authorizations. There are no consequences for illegal entry, and the migrants know it.

Under the Biden administration, far too many Border Patrol agents have been turned into social workers, even as illegal immigration surges.

In the meantime, our gaping borders serve as another reminder that the minds of liberal politicians are often open at both ends.