The July arrest numbers at the southern border haven’t been released yet, but they must be pretty bad.
I reach that conclusion because last week, the White House released not one, but two essentially meaningless immigration plans — one a “blueprint”, the other a “strategy”.
None of it changes the administration’s open-ish border policies, except perhaps to increase the flow of illegal aliens into the U.S.
I can see it now:
“Mr. President, arrests of illegal aliens — er, erroneously present non-citizens — are up in July! What should we do?”
“We have to protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Let’s release an immigration blueprint!”
The “Biden Administration Blueprint for a Fair, Orderly and Humane Immigration System” is mainly warmed-over leftovers of prior administration statements, including calls to pass mass amnesties. It improbably touts “considerable progress to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system”, including the laughable boast that “we continue to deter irregular migration at our Southern border.”
In addition to copy-pasting earlier White House statements, the blueprint adds some new measures designed to further expand asylum, including defining “persecution” more broadly, seeking funds to pay for lawyers for illegal aliens (which is prohibited by law), a supposed resumption of expedited deportations (which is actually a tactic designed to expedite asylum grants), and setting up what amount to U.S. immigration stores in Central America (“Migration Resource Centers”) to “provide referrals to services for people seeking lawful pathways for migration and protection.”
The blueprint’s section on addressing “root causes” of migration from Central America apparently wasn’t enough, because two days later there came a “strategy” on just that. Putting aside the fact that a large and growing share of border-jumping illegals come from places other than Mexico or Central America, the root-causes strategy tries to pass itself off as something new by organizing itself into five pillars (in Roman numerals, no less!). It’s the same nation-building fairy tale as before — address economic inequality, ending corruption, countering violence, etc. — and it worked so well in Afghanistan!
All the spin in the world can’t change the fact that the Biden administration created the border crisis and has no real idea how to get out of it.