My last post referenced DHS’s proposal for handling the surge of up to 18,000 migrants per day it expects at the Southwest border once CDC orders directing the expulsion of illegal entrants, issued pursuant to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, expire (currently set to occur December 21). While the department is sending additional resources to the border, overwhelmed Border Patrol agents need relief, which the Biden administration isn’t providing. The only solution that will give them relief is detention, and the sooner it realizes that, the more quickly the inhumane situation at the border will end.
“Biden’s Border Fiasco”. Although it was little noticed during the 2020 presidential season, Joe Biden made a roll-back of Donald Trump’s border policies the key element of his immigration talking points during the campaign.
After he was elected, but before he was sworn in, Biden backed off of those promises, still vowing to undo the Trump policies, but said he would do so “at a slower pace than he initially promised, to avoid winding up with ‘2 million people on our border’” and only after “setting up guardrails” to prevent a border surge.
Nonetheless, once in the Oval Office, Biden quickly changed course — ditching the policies that had created, in the words of Rodney Scott (the president’s first Border Patrol chief), “arguably the most effective border security in” U.S. history.
Why did Biden flip-flop? Scott alleged (and he would know) that “Common sense border security recommendations from experienced career professionals [were] being ignored and stymied by inexperienced political employees.”
The results were more or less what you would have expected, and illegal entries surged. In FY 2021, agents apprehended nearly 1.66 million migrants at the Southwest border (a new yearly record), even while an estimated 389,000 others (know colloquially as “got-aways”) successfully evaded apprehension and made their way into the United States.
As bad as that was, things at the Southwest border just got worse in FY 2022, as apprehensions soared past 2.2 million and nearly 600,000 got-aways entered the United States, scot free.
It’s not simply conservatives who have taken notice of the situation at the border. Two former Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, have both alluded to the situation there (Obama elliptically, Clinton more directly), while the editorial board of the left-leaning Bloomberg Opinion termed the situation “Biden’s border fiasco” in an August editorial calling for leadership on the issue.
Detention and Deterrence. Keep in mind that those nearly one million got-aways were not the only illegal Southwest border migrants who are now living in the country. The Biden administration has — by my estimates — released more than 1.5 million aliens who had been apprehended by agents. They all will be here indefinitely, if not forever.
Most if not all of those releases contravened congressional mandates requiring DHS to detain illegal entrants, from the time that they are apprehended to the point at which they are either granted asylum or removed.
In fact, the Biden administration is fighting at least two suits (Texas v. Biden and U.S. v. Texas) filed by states that have been adversely affected by the president’s alien release policies.
Why is the Biden administration flouting congressional detention mandates? Because, in a break from every prior administration (including Clinton’s and Obama’s), the current one has expressly rejected the deterrence of illegal entrants as a border policy. And detention — which denies aliens with weak or bogus asylum claims the ability to live and work here — is the most effective deterrent.
“Surging Resources”. Which brings me back to DHS’s post-Title 42 plans, formally captioned “Update on Southwest Border Security and Preparedness Ahead of Court-Ordered Lifting of Title 42”.
That document lays out six “pillars” DHS contends “have guided and will continue to guide” its work.
Pillars 2 and 4 are really the heart of the administration’s plan. Pillar 2 will boost CBP’s efficiency in moving migrants out of the agency’s processing facilities (some to be deported, but most likely to be released), and 4 focuses on giving more money to the communities into which migrants are headed after they are released and to NGOs to feed, shelter, and transport them into the interior.
In Pillar 1, captioned “Surging resources, including personnel, transportation, medical support, and facilities to support border operations”, DHS asserts:
We have hired nearly one thousand Border Patrol Processing Coordinators and added 2,500 contractors and personnel from other government agencies, which along with innovations below, are helping return agents to the field to perform their essential law enforcement and national security mission.
The “innovations” referenced are border infrastructure projects that I discussed in my last post, almost exclusively barriers (i.e., the wall), and barrier-adjacent work like installing fiber-optic cable, lights, and sensors.
Of course, those projects aren’t innovations at all. Rather, they are projects for which Congress has already appropriated money and that the Trump administration had begun before Biden put a “pause” on border construction on his first day in office.
That leaves the fewer than 3,500 “Border Patrol Processing Coordinators”, contractors, and third-agency personnel to which Pillar 1 refers. DHS’s post-42 update doesn’t explain what exactly those individuals will be doing, but it appears that they will be helping agents care for detained migrants and completing paperwork.
That will free up Border Patrol agents to “return to the field”, but that field is more chaotic than it has ever been in history thanks to the administration’s irrational and feckless (and in many ways, particularly as relates to releases, illegal) border policies.
Just look at the numbers. In the decade between FY 2011 and FY 2020, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended just over 4.27 million illegal migrants, at a rate of just fewer than 1,300 per day.
In the 638 days between Biden’s first full month in office (February 2021) and the end of October 2022, agents there caught more than 3.785 million aliens who had entered illegally, or 5,933 per day. That’s more than 4.5 times the 10-year average, but less than a third of what they could be dealing with post-Title 42.
Border Patrol Processing Coordinators, third-agency personnel, and contractors won’t be able to perform agents’ key duties — apprehending aliens who have entered illegally and preventing the entry of other aliens, drugs, and contraband. Perhaps they can drive buses, babysit migrants, and fill out forms, but that’s about it.
Here’s why it’s an even bigger problem than it seems. There are fewer than 17,000 agents assigned to the Southwest border, so even though they work 50-hour shifts, there are just over 5,000 agents “on the line” at any given time.
Even if those up to 18,000 aliens entering illegally per day were to enter at just one spot in a single-file line, agents would still be unable to handle the flow.
But, of course, those migrants won’t enter at just one spot — smugglers and their cartel confederates will send migrants over at many different spots on that 1,954-mile border, all the better to swamp CBP resources to move drugs, contraband, and aliens who don’t want to be caught through gaps in the line.
You don’t have to trust me, however — that’s exactly how Scott described the operations of those illicit organizations in his September 2021 letter. The migrant surge didn’t just happen — it’s part of the business plans for both smugglers and the cartels.
Not to worry, however, because the administration promises that it will be sending more agents to the border. How many? Three hundred — a 1.7 percent staffing increase even while apprehensions have increased more than 300 percent under Biden.
Even that paltry increase won’t be happening anytime soon. Rather, those 300 agents are what the Biden administration has requested in its FY 2023 budget request. Congress may pass an “omnibus” spending bill funding those agents next week (although members would be smart to add an extra zero to that number before they vote), and maybe it won’t.
Even if Congress does fund 300 more agents before the end of the year, they will not be trained up until the summer — at which point 2.5 million or more migrants will have shown up at the Southwest border.
Detention Is Key. Our Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico line need relief now, but the Biden administration has no real intention — let alone a plan — to provide it, aside from its (frankly insulting) 300-agent request in its FY 2023 budget.
That means the only relief the president can offer agents is to cut the migrant flow. That requires detention, and not just the “10 soft-sided facilities to increase our CBP holding capacity by over a third since early 2021” DHS refers to in its post-Title 42 update.
Migrants are only held in those facilities while they are being processed, either for expulsion under Title 42 or release into the United States. Once there are no Title 42 expulsions, migrants will simply be processed for release — and massive releases will just encourage more to come.
The Alternatives to Detention (ATD) referred to in Pillar 3 won’t help, either. Not only is ATD costly and ineffective, but aliens who are released on ATD are able to live and work in the United States — which is the reason that they are entering illegally to begin with. If that continues, as stated above, more will come, and in increasing numbers.
Only real detention will do. The government can provide for aliens in detention while they pursue their asylum claims, but those migrants will not be free to live and work here until and unless they are granted asylum. Once the administration starts detaining migrants, illegal entries will drop, which is exactly what happened when Trump denied migrants the ability to live and work here by sending them back to Mexico to await their asylum hearings.
And for those who complain that detention is inhumane, there’s no humanity in the current situation at the Southwest border.
All migrants are traumatized and risk assault and death on the trip to the United States (an estimated 856 migrants died in FY 2022, even while agents engaged in a record 22,000 search-and-rescue efforts), while the smuggling fees they pay support the cartels sending the drugs that killed a record number of Americans last year.
Border Patrol agents need relief, and not the useless and insulting kind that Biden’s DHS proposes to send. Detention is key to halting the migrant tsunami at the Southwest border, and to providing real relief to the agents there. The sooner the administration realizes that fact, the sooner the inhumanity will end.