Shortly before Thanksgiving, I wrote about the Biden administration’s illegal alien vanishing act:
The Biden administration has now come upon what very well could be its silver bullet to kill off whatever remains of America’s immigration system. The projectile? Using the parole power in its attempt to convert as much of the population of illegally entering economic migrants as it can into people supposedly fleeing persecution or violence or harm of one sort or another. And I don’t mean paroling aliens out of detention who have illegally crossed the border, which the administration is already doing on a mass scale. I mean granting aliens parole before they ever get to the U.S.
The benefits [to President Biden] are obvious. First and most foremost, if aliens enter the U.S. on parole, they enter legally, they won’t be apprehended, and they won’t need to be counted in the Biden administration’s apprehension statistics. In fact, Biden will be able to crow about dramatically reducing the number of apprehensions at the border, and bringing the border under “control”, simply by obviating the need for aliens to enter illegally.
Well, two months later, I can report that the Biden administration is indeed proudly crowing about its sleight of hand, or, more aptly, strutting like a peacock. On Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued its December Operational Update, which states that:
The December update shows our new border enforcement measures are working. Even as overall encounters rose because of smugglers spreading misinformation around the court-ordered lifting of the Title 42 public health order, we continued to see a sharp decline in the number of Venezuelans unlawfully crossing our southwest border, down 82% from September 2022,” said CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller. “Early data suggests the expanded measures for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans are having a similar impact, and we look forward to sharing the additional data in the next update.
In December, the large number of individuals fleeing failing communist regimes in Nicaragua and Cuba contributed to an increased number of migrants attempting to cross the border. Venezuelans, which previously constituted a part of that increase, continue to arrive at far lower numbers as a result of the migration enforcement process that includes expulsions to Mexico and lawful pathways. Venezuelans have dropped from roughly 1,100 a day the week before that process was announced, to roughly 100 a day consistently throughout December.
Unlike with David Copperfield, we didn’t need a lawsuit to reveal the secrets of the Biden administration’s illegal alien vanishing act. But I have to hand it to Biden’s DHS. It is using Biden’s parole rigamarole to boast about its border prowess even though overall “encounters” at the southwest border actually increased in December, and indeed represented the highest number of encounters ever recorded in the month of December. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the Biden administration would have the chutzpah to do that!