In my last post, I examined Vice President Kamala Harris’s duties running the administration’s “root causes” strategy, which has focused exclusively on illegal migration from the “Northern Triangle” nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. I’ll now explain that strategy in the context of the administration’s efforts — or lack thereof — to address “pull factors” drawing migrants to come here illegally and offer some basic border math to explain how futile this limited root causes strategy has been.
The End of Deterrence. Deterring would-be migrants from entering the United States illegally has been the cornerstone of every administration’s border-security strategy prior to the Biden-Harris administration. The purpose of such deterrence is to minimize and negate the effect of the key pull factors drawing would-be migrants to come here illegally: the opportunity to live and work in the United States.
Deterring would-be illegal migrants has been the cornerstone of every administration’s border-security strategy prior to Biden-Harris.
Border deterrence can take many forms, but three are key: Border Patrol staffing and infrastructure, migrant detention, and prosecution.
Prior to FY 2021, the Border Patrol regularly published statistics on the number of agents serving at the Southwest and Northern borders, but the current administration holds those numbers close as a sort of national-security secret. Anecdotally, however, I have been told that Border Patrol’s Southwest cadre has essentially remained static or slightly declined from the roughly 17,000 agents there in FY 2020.
Even that statistic is deceiving, however, because the number of illegal entrants those agents have been tasked with apprehending and processing has surged in the past few years, from just over 851,500 in FY 2019 to more than 2.2 million in FY 2022. Through the first nine months of FY 2024, Southwest border agents have made nearly 1.4 million apprehensions.
As for infrastructure — border fencing and the roads, lights, cameras, and sensors agents rely upon as “force multipliers” when on the job — one of the first acts of the Biden-Harris administration was to put a “pause” on further construction of those components of what’s known as the “border wall system”.
Aside from plugging gaps in some high-traffic areas, there have been no true improvements on that system since that pause took effect: unused fencing panels stacked up on the ground; partially constructed roads have washed out; and light towers are either incomplete or not connected to power sources.
And even as apprehensions soared, the current administration refused to comply with statutory mandates that require illegal entrants to be detained. By my estimates, DHS has released at least 88.5 percent of inadmissible aliens CBP encountered at the Southwest border under the Biden-Harris administration who weren’t expelled under Title 42, more than four million aliens in total.
As a federal judge held in March 2023, those releases are the key driver of the surge in illegal entrants at the Southwest border under the current administration (i.e., "pull factors"), and have had a much more significant impact than the “geopolitical and other factors” at the heart of the root causes strategy (so-called "push factors").
Finally, prosecutions of illegal entrants for “improper entry” under section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) have plummeted under Biden-Harris, as I explained in April.
They dropped from nearly 4,900 in January 2020 (a month in which agents apprehended 29,205 illegal entrants at the Southwest border) to just 1,253 in the first quarter of FY 2024 (when apprehensions exceeded 629,000 there).
Non-Deterrence: A Feature, Not a Bug in the Biden-Harris Border Strategy. That negation of border deterrence under Biden-Harris was intentional, a key feature and not an inadvertent bug in the administration’s border strategy. For proof, I turn to two key points, the first being statements made by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Fox News Sunday on May 1, 2021.
During that interview, host Bret Baier asked Mayorkas whether it is “the objective of the Biden administration to reduce, sharply reduce the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border? Is that the objective?” “Reducing illegal entries” is the definition of deterrence.
In response, Mayorkas made clear that: “It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, orderly, and legal pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.”
In other words, as I explained later, Biden-Harris abandoned the border deterrence policies followed by every prior administration in favor of a system under which any foreign national who made it here — legally or otherwise — would be allowed to apply for asylum here, regardless of the strength of the alien’s claim or even whether the alien had any claim at all.
If that’s not clear enough, consider a July 2022 report from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), following an incident in which mounted Border Patrol agents were accused of “whipping” illegal migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande into the United States at Del Rio, Texas, the prior September.
Those whipping claims triggered a firestorm, which was itself whipped up by kneejerk complaints from many in the administration, including Vice President Harris, who stated she was “deeply troubled” by images of the alleged while opining that “human beings should never be treated that way”.
President Biden was even less circumspect, calling the incident “outrageous”, and vowing: “I promise you, those people [the mounted agents] will pay. They will be — an investigation is underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”
Keep that presidential “consequences” threat in mind as I explain that while OPR concluded in its report that no agents whipped any migrants, it did find that:
During this incident, instead of processing migrants for admission or directing them to an area where thousands of individuals already awaited, multiple mounted [Border Patrol agents] used force, or threats of force, to coerce or compel individuals to return to Mexico. For this reason, OPR presented the case to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas which [sic] eventually declined prosecutorial interest. [Emphasis added.]
To put that another way, OPR accused the agents of attempting to deter migrants from entering illegally — using “force, or threats of force” to send them back to Mexico — and attempted to prosecute those agents for doing so.
Fortunately, someone at the U.S. Attorney’s Office understood CBP’s Use of Force Policy, which explains that agents have “the responsibility to deter ... the unlawful movement or illegal entry of aliens” and can use “’objectively reasonable’ force” when “necessary” to do so. (Emphasis added.)
Just because deterrence is contrary to the administration’s border policy doesn’t make it illegal. But the very threat of prosecution for those agents underscores how inapposite to the administration’s border policy deterrence is.
The Globalization of Illegal Immigration and “Areas of Highest Out-Migration”. As noted in my last post, Vice President Harris explained in her cover letter to a July 2021 white paper captioned “U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” that: “The root causes must be addressed both in addition to relief efforts — and apart from these efforts. In everything we do, we must target our efforts in those areas of highest out-migration.” (Emphasis added.)
When that white paper was issued, the Northern Triangle was the area of highest illegal “out-migration”. Of the more than 200,000 illegal entrants apprehended at the Southwest border that month, 73,000-plus came from those three countries (36.4 percent) and nearly 53,000 were from Mexico (26.4 percent).
Of the nearly 250,000 illegal entrants apprehended at the Southwest border in December 2023, more than 59,000 were from the Northern Triangle and 56,000-plus from Mexico, but combined, migrants from those four countries represented just 46.3 percent of total apprehensions that month.
Back in July 2021, when that “root causes” white paper was issued, just over 6,000 illegal migrants from Venezuela were apprehended at the Southwest border — 3 percent of the total.
By last December, however, nearly 47,000 of the illegal migrants apprehended by agents came from Venezuela (18.8 percent), and that country was the “area of out-migration” for nearly 10 percent of illegal Southwest border entrants apprehended in FY 2023 (more than 200,000 in total).
But Harris never added Venezuela to her “root causes” portfolio, even as the administration eased oil sanctions on the socialist dictatorship running that country in November 2022, in exchange for which she could have pushed her “root causes” agenda there.
Turbocharging of Pull Factors. She didn’t extend the root causes plan to Venezuela or any other country outside the Northern Triangle. Instead, the administration turbocharged the pull factors drawing illegal migrants — and illegal migrants from Venezuela in particular — to come here.
As noted, the chance to earn higher wages is among the biggest lures drawing migrants to this country. The average monthly salary in Venezuela in March 2023 was $142.70, whereas the average hourly wage in the United States that month was more than $11 — a 12-to-1 differential.
The Biden-Harris administration set the stage for that Venezuelan migration rush in March 2021, when it designated Venezuela for “temporary protected status” (TPS), and extended TPS benefits to nationals of that country here, regardless of their immigration statuses.
TPS status includes employment authorization, and the 564,000-plus Venezuelan nationals apprehended entering illegally after that announcement likely figured that if they came, they’d get work cards, too. If so, it was a smart bet, as DHS expanded Venezuelan TPS to cover more than 700,000 nationals of that country here last September.
TPS wasn’t the only lure Biden-Harris dangled in the face of would-be illegal migrants, however. Parole under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the INA also offers the opportunity to apply for a work card, and as of June, the administration had utilized congressionally circumscribed authority to release more than 2.2 million inadmissible aliens encountered by CBP into the United States.
That’s a population larger than the number of residents in 14 U.S. states, but the administration likely would have paroled in at least one million more illegal migrants by now had a federal judge not deemed its border parole policies illegal in March 2023 and shut them down (the case is currently on appeal).
Here’s simple border math: Migrant releases plus work authorization minus deterrence equals an irresistible magnet drawing nationals from all over the world here. That force will overcome even the most effective “root causes” strategy, particularly one hyper-focused on one limited region. Vice President Kamala Harris should have realized that, but she hasn’t yet, and may never will.