New York Post, February 20, 2024
The White House has just proven that Republican objections to the Senate border deal were right all along.
In a leaked preview of next month’s State of the Union address in Axios, “a source close to Biden” (i.e., a top White House staff member) has revealed that President Biden is considering the “bold move” of issuing an “executive order that would dramatically stanch the record flow of migrants into the Southwest.”
So he really did have the power to do this, just like the GOP said!
It was just last month that Biden claimed “I’ve done all I can do” to stop the border crisis. In pushing for the terrible Schumer-Lankford bill, he said, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now.”
We all know that Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory,” but can he really have forgotten that he always had this authority and chose to effectively open the borders instead?
No, the problem is not the president’s cognitive decline, real as that is — rather, it’s an administration that’s been lying for three years, and has finally realized it has a political problem.
Shortly after kick-starting the border crisis, the president said the immediate jump in illegal immigration was perfectly normal: “It happens every single solitary year.”
Recently impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly assured Congress and the public that the border was secure, even as his agency has released close to 3.5 million illegal aliens from its custody into the country (while millions more scurried past overwhelmed border agents).
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has assured us, “The president has done more to secure the border and to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else. He really has!”
The administration’s lies on immigration have been so brazen, so gigantic, so frequently repeated — and the results so catastrophic — that this last-minute PR move before the election won’t work.
The whole reason for the “bipartisan” Senate bill was to have it rejected by Republicans, so Democratic candidates could shift blame for the border crisis to the GOP. But if the president can just stop the mass infiltration of our border on his own, as Republicans have been saying for years, then the whole rationale for a rushed border bill evaporates.
The leak about the president’s plans didn’t specify what the possible executive order would say, but the president has always had the authority, under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” any time, for as long as he wants, if he judges that letting them in “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
But he doesn’t even have to take such a “bold move” — he could simply undo some of the 500-plus immigration actions he’s taken over the past three years to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get in and stay.
He could, for instance, detain border jumpers (as he’s required to do by law) instead of letting them go.
To show how dramatic Biden’s border vandalism has been: In December 2020, the Trump administration’s last full month in office, Border Patrol released 17 illegal border jumpers; in December 2023, Biden’s policies resulted in the release of 191,142 — 11,000 times more illegal migrants let loose.
Or Biden could pressure our neighbor to the south to restart Remain in Mexico. Or he could restore the safe-third-country agreements that President Donald Trump had negotiated with several Central American countries.
He could even allow ICE agents to do their jobs again, reversing the policies that have resulted in a 67% drop in deportations of criminal aliens.
Whatever Biden’s going to do, he’d better do it soon.
January saw close to 6,000 illegal immigrants a day at the southern border, down from the almost unbelievable 10,000 a day in December but still six times more than President Barack Obama’s DHS secretary said would overwhelm the department’s ability to control the border.
Each day the president delays doing something to reverse the disaster he’s caused at the border represents thousands more illegal immigrants released into American communities.
Unless that was the point all along.