Fact-Checking the White House on Immigration — and Amnesty

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre last week attempted to deflect blame for the disaster at the Southwest border onto President Biden’s congressional political opponents, asserting: “House Republicans keep getting in the way of doing the work to deal with what we’re seeing at the border.” That’s a questionable proposition, to be kind, but note that Jean-Pierre also put in a plug for amnesty as a cure for what’s ailing our overwhelmed Border Patrol Agents at the U.S.-Mexico line.

“Republicans in the House Voted to Get Rid of 2,000 Agents”? If you’re wondering what, exactly, House Republicans are doing to “get in the way of” securing the border, you need to go up a few lines in the White House read-out of that press conference, where Jean-Pierre asserted:

If you look at the national security supplemental that the President put forward, he put border security in there — right? — because he believes in order to get the work done at the border, we need more resources. DHS needs more resources. Our Border Patrol agents need more resources. We need more immigration judges. We need more resources to get this done. We need the technology at the border to deal with what’s going on with migrants at the border.

And — and, you know — you know, last May, the Speaker and Republican — the Republicans in the House, they voted to get rid of 2,000 — 2,000 Border Patrol agents. I mean, that’s their focus. So, of course, that’s not helpful.

I understand that most Republicans are fiscal conservatives by nature (assuming the money in question isn’t going to their home districts), but cutting Border Patrol agents in the face of a mass surge in illegal entrants hardly seems the place to start. But did congressional Republicans really attempt to take the axe to 2,000 agents in May?

Not if you believe Newsweek, which fact-checked this claim — which apparently was first made by the White House last March — on May 21.

In a March 20, 2023, press release captioned “FIVE-ALARM FIRE: The House Freedom Caucus’ Extreme Budget Proposal Endangers Public Safety”, the administration complained:

The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus has made their priorities clear: imposing devastating cuts to public safety and increasing costs for working- and middle-class families, all to protect and extend tax breaks skewed to the wealthy and big corporations.

...

Their proposals will:

Make Our Border Less Secure The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus proposal would eliminate funding for more than 2,000 Customs and Border Protection agents and officers and severely undermine our ability to secure the border and combat drug trafficking — allowing an additional 150,000 pounds of cocaine, nearly 900 pounds of fentanyl, nearly 2,000 pounds of heroin, and more than 17,000 pounds of methamphetamine into our country. [Emphasis in original.]

In response, the House Freedom Caucus (which omits the “Extreme MAGA” sobriquet from both its official title and its own releases) tweeted:

In any event, Newsweek deemed the White House’s assertions as “False”, explaining:

Republicans have not directly called for the cutting of border agents; rather, budgetary plans submitted by the conservative wing of Republican lawmakers would, according to the White House, create budget cuts that would lead to the loss of 2,000 border staff positions. However, the House Freedom Caucus, which made the proposals, dismissed the Biden administration's criticisms.

Then, there was an assessment of a similar claim by President Biden, this one by PolitiFact (hardly a right-wing outfit), also in May.

In a speech at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., on May 10, 2023, the president asserted that a spending plan offered by the House Republican conference “would cut federal law enforcement officers — 30,000 — including 11,000 FBI agents, 2,000 Border agents, DEA agents, and so on.”

PolitiFact deemed this claim “Mostly False”, explaining that it was based on assessments by the White House’s own Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of what the outlet deemed “the Republicans’ starting point for negotiations”, included in H.R. 2811, the “Limit, Save, Grow Act”. According to PolitiFact:

The plan returns discretionary spending to fiscal year 2022 level in fiscal year 2024 and then grows 1% annually for a decade. That adds up to a savings, compared with the previous trajectory of spending, of about $3.2 trillion.

The bill specifies only a few cuts, repealing Biden’s accomplishments on renewable energy tax credits while slashing funding for IRS enforcement and clawing back unspent COVID-19 money.

...

Experts agree with Biden that the House bill would lead to steep cuts, giving the claim an element of truth. Some Republicans have called for keeping funding whole for defense and veterans’ care, which would require deeper cuts in remaining departments.

But so far no one knows precisely how those cuts would play out — if the Senate and Biden ever agreed to them — which gives taxpayers a misleading impression.

“How Those Cuts Would Play Out”. A lot has happened since last May, so how exactly have the “cuts” proposed played out? For that, we need to turn to a different bill, H.R. 4367, “The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act”, which passed the House in September on a vote of 220-208. Every Republican voted in favor of the bill, as did two Democrats, Jared F. Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.).

As the GOP members of the House Appropriations Committee explained at the time, the bill: “Secures our southwest border by ... [p]roviding $496 million for 22,000 Border Patrol Agents, the highest level ever funded”.

Given that CBP had a cadre of 19,740 Border Patrol agents as of the end of FY 2020 (the last fiscal year for which CBP has released figures), that funding would actually appear to increase the number of agents over the FY 2020 levels by 2,260, assuming the Senate passes the House funding bill as written and that the president doesn’t veto it.

Of course, that didn’t stop Jean-Pierre from pushing that somewhat questionable 2,000-agent cut in her official statements on January 3.

“On the First Day of his Administration”, Biden “Put Forth Comprehensive Immigration Legislation”. CBS News’ White House reporter Weijia Jiang didn’t contest the spokesperson’s statements on the funding cuts, but she did follow up on them, asking Jean-Pierre: “But does the President believe it’s just a money issue? Or does he think that the policies have to change too?” That leads me to the administration’s continued amnesty push.

Here’s how the White House spokesperson responded:

Well, I would remind you, Weijia, on the first day of his administration, he put forth a comprehensive immigration policy — legislation. And he presented that to Congress. And he did that because he understands that the immigration process — or the system — has been broken for decades — for decades.

So, obviously, we need to change policy and work on policy to deal with a broken system. So, it’s both.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Post, I called out the “comprehensive immigration legislation” President Biden “put forth” on the day he was inaugurated for what it is — a mass amnesty that would benefit not only nearly every alien illegally present in the United States (and more than a few criminals), but that would also open the door for aliens who were removed under the Trump administration to return.

Amnesty is the reason the White House termed that bill the “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021”, and why even then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wouldn’t touch it — a mass amnesty wasn’t popular then and really isn’t popular now.

That bill would have done nothing to secure the border, aside from shoveling loads of your cash at somewhat questionable “border technology” and infrastructure that would “enhance the ability to process asylum seekers”, and shipping $4 billion in foreign aid to the “Northern Triangle countries” of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to address what the White House termed the “root causes of immigration”.

Note that the $4 billion payout would allegedly be “conditioned” on those countries’ “ability to reduce the endemic corruption, violence, and poverty that causes people to flee their home countries” — because nothing stems corruption like sending corrupt officials cash.

That “root causes” funding almost seems quaint in retrospect, given that 87.6 percent of the 78,414 illegal migrants encountered at the Southwest border in January 2021 came from the Northern Triangle and Mexico, while this past November, fewer than 49 percent of the 242,418 encountered aliens did.

The remaining 51-plus percent — more than 125,000 illegal migrants encountered by CBP at the Southwest border in November — came from farther abroad, as Biden’s policies have made his border crisis go global. That’s a lot of “root causes” to address — and a lot more of the taxpayers’ money to burn.

As I explained in that op-ed, the only logical conclusion one can draw from the Biden administration’s efforts to break the U.S. immigration system by effectively opening the Southwest border to the world is that he’s attempting to force the “Extreme MAGA” Republicans he consistently derides to trade the amnesty he has sought since “the first day of his administration” for a modicum of border security.

If anything, Jean-Pierre’s statements on January 3 simply affirm that conclusion. It would be great, however, if an otherwise credulous White House press corps would simply look at the “comprehensive immigration legislation” the president’s spokesperson continues to peddle as a silver bullet for that border crisis.

Jean-Pierre’s statements implicitly confirm that “what we’re seeing at the border” — with hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants pouring into the country monthly — is unacceptable. If she just came clean about the proposals the administration is offering to address that crisis — and what the president’s congressional opponents are offering in response — perhaps that crisis could be resolved. Good luck with that.