National Review, June 6, 2023
The Department of Homeland Security has released border numbers that it trusts gullible and/or uninformed reporters will parrot. But the numbers really just highlight the White House’s long-standing strategy of funneling illegal immigrants through the ports of entry so they appear “legal.” In other words, the White House policy of accommodating mass illegal immigration rather than stopping it is working.
The factoid that administration-adjacent media will amplify is that “unlawful entries between ports of entry along the Southwest Border have decreased by more than 70 percent since May 11.” Great, right?
Not so fast. Note the qualifier “between ports of entry” — that is to say, people apprehended by the Border Patrol because they entered without inspection. But how many people who would have crossed illegally and turned themselves in (knowing they’d be released) instead scheduled their illegal immigration through the OpenTable CBP OneTM app?
DHS for the first time reported those numbers, and they confirm my assessment in these pages back in April: “Biden to Aliens: Don’t Break the Law — We’ll Do It for You.”
For the period May 12 to June 2, there were 3,400 Border Patrol “encounters” per day, plus 300 “unscheduled” encounters at ports of entry. That in itself is nearly quadruple the level Obama’s DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, said constituted a crisis. But there’s more.
DHS reports that during that same period, an average of 1,070 inadmissible aliens per day were “processed” at ports of entry, a number that CBP has increased to 1,250 a day starting June 1. The top nationalities were Haitian, Mexican, and Venezuelan.
On top of that, DHS reports that an additional 23,000 inadmissible aliens, in total, were admitted and released, from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, under a program announced in January. That’s another 1,095 a day.
Remember, none of these people is authorized by law to enter the United States.
So when you add all this up you get, if my math is right, 5,865 people per day who either entered illegally or were let in illegally by the Biden administration. Virtually all of them have already been released into the United States or soon will be. Multiply that by 30, and you get a rate of about 176,000 illegal aliens per month — a level of illegal immigration at the southern border that is lower than some months under Biden, and higher than others. So the border crisis continues apace.
Mission Accomplished, indeed.
DHS predictions (and my own expectations) of a big jump in illegal crossings after the lifting of Title 42 didn’t materialize because many migrants sensibly adopted a wait-and-see posture to the whole CBP One process. If the Gringos are going to let you walk through a port of entry if you just wait for an appointment, why get your feet wet?
But recent reporting from the border by my colleague Todd Bensman shows that many illegal border-crossers who’ve dragged children along with them have grown impatient waiting for CBP One and are crossing illegally — because the Border Patrol is just letting them go, as before. As Todd wrote in the New York Post, “The runway into America is clear and open, just like always, to any parent with a kid.”
And even the repatriation of 38,400 illegal aliens touted in the DHS press release isn’t what it seems. Both Todd and the Epoch Times have reported that at least some of those who’ve been removed were immediately recycled into the CBP One line and admitted “legally.” The Epoch Times quoted a Border Patrol union spokesman: “It’s a backdoor deal. The minute they go into Mexico, they turn around at the port of entry, and they’re CBP One.”
But aren’t people coming to the ports of entry doing so legally? No, they’re not. My colleague Andrew Arthur has a deep dive into the statute, and he summarizes: “Whether the ‘immigration officer’ who encounters that alien is wearing CBP officer blue or Border Patrol green, the same rules apply.”
The CBP One app was initially developed during Covid for legal cross-border travel, to avoid backups and people breathing on each other too much. The administration’s use of it to allow inadmissible aliens to schedule arrival at a port of entry to make an asylum claim is not itself illegal (though the foreigner doing so is still an illegal alien since he has no right to enter).
The problem comes when Biden’s DHS releases such people into the United States, defying the mandate in federal law that they be held in detention during the entire course of their proceedings. If the administration weren’t flouting the laws with mass releases, the number of foreigners using this gambit to enter the U.S. would fall dramatically, as we saw after the institution of Remain in Mexico.
Few of those coming to the border — whether jumping the line or using the scheduling app — have genuine asylum claims. But their objective in coming to the border is not to actually receive asylum, but rather to apply for asylum, which under Biden means release and years of undisturbed residence in the U.S. Even if some day, years from now, these aliens were actually to show up for their hearings and, having been turned down, were actually to return home (this is a hypothetical, remember), they still will have finagled years of employment and residence (and maybe even the birth of U.S. citizens) in the United States, something they had no right to under U.S. law.
The White House sees the challenge at the border as one of public relations — the border is a huge political vulnerability, so it wants to massage the situation to make it appear as though illegal immigration has declined. But actually reducing the arrival and settlement of people who have no right to be here is not the administration’s objective, or even one it sees as morally legitimate. That’s not going to change so long as the Biden-Harris administration remains in office.