With all international eyes focused on Ukraine, to our immediate south another security crisis remains unabated.
Ukraine is a global travesty teetering on genocide, so President Joe Biden comparing European families fleeing Vladimir Putin’s Taliban-like evil to Latin Americans “seeking a better life” is foolhardy.
Many Republicans have claimed the ongoing border chaos is deliberate. When you compare pre and post-Biden numbers, that belief seems less and less conspiratorial.
March is almost over, and we’ll get this month’s number of illegal crossings in about two weeks. The amount is likely to hit 7,000 people per day, higher than February when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data showed agents encountered roughly 165,000 migrants at the U.S-Mexico border. The 165,000 was a 60% increase from February 2021.
The Biden administration notoriously struggled last year to curtail record-breaking illegal crossings, and we’ve now hit more than 150,000 encounters every month of the current fiscal year, including nearly 155,000 migrants in January, the highest total for that month in more than two decades.
While in Piedras Negras, we came across Hondurans who returned from Eagle Pass and will try to cross again tonight. They don’t want to get caught. Their destination is San Antonio, Texas where family awaits for them. pic.twitter.com/36T0KnHESP
— Auden B. Cabello (@CabelloAuden) March 29, 2022
All this occurred in winter months, which typically see a slowdown in attempted crossings.
Even though we’ve yet to hit peak traveling season, CBP has begun releasing migrants into U.S. border towns — not Cambridge, Georgetown or Chicago’s north side, of course.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, created a reasonable system to impose order at the border. Other than pure partisan and racial politics, there was never any reason to destroy it, as Team Biden did. Even if Democrats have different priorities, it made zero sense to create a chaotic rush at the border before a better system was in place.
Embattled DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who should have been fired for incompetence a year ago, predictably claimed former President Donald Trump “dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety.” This slur is as preposterous as when Biden administration officials argued last year they received no guidance from their predecessors on COVID-19 vaccines.
“There are places along our border where barriers are appropriate and useful and places where they aren’t. But we could put up a wall of a different kind — the human kind — tomorrow,” Kevin Williamson opined earlier this month. “The federal government employs 20,000 Border Patrol agents, and our border with Mexico is less than 2,000 miles. That means that we could station a Border Patrol agent every 500 feet or so on the border, or every 1,500 feet if we split them into three eight-hour shifts for 24-hour surveillance. And 1,500 feet is not very far: They could see each other.”
Last summer, Biden extended the Trump-era Title 42, a statute enacted amid the early surge in COVID-19, so that CBP could immediately remove those entering the country without authorization in the interest of public health.
With coronavirus waning, the president is prepared to end Title 42, which would invite millions of undocumented people back into our country — in addition to the new Afghani and Ukrainian refugees America is absorbing.
The White House reportedly has no plan after this potential repeal. Maybe Biden should listen to border state Democrats, instead of placating his rabid left-wing base sitting comfortably in Beverly Hills, Brooklyn, and San Francisco.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
