Biden and The Border

WASHINGTON, DC, Nov 4 — It’s a few days before the much-anticipated midterm elections.  The outcome will decide whether we sink or swim. The disastrous failures of the Biden administration’s socialist regime have ruled our lives for the past 22 months. Joe Biden and his henchmen wasted no time in creating chaos: Afghanistan, the soaring rate of inflation and cost of living, recession, and unsustainable government spending.

Meanwhile, to make matters worse, within days of taking office, we saw the beginnings of the unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrants at the Mexican border — an invasion that has surpassed crisis proportions. The latest count provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency [CBP] shows that nearly a quarter of a million migrants sought to enter the U.S. last month. According to the CBP, in the Fiscal Year 2022 that ended on September 30 a staggering 2,378,944 migrants — up 37% from the 1.73 million recorded in FY ‘21 — tried to illegally enter the country. That number doesn’t include the so-called “gotaways,” illegals who managed to evade the border patrols. Correspondent Bill Melugin at Fox News says there were 599,000 gotaways in FY ’22.

Andrew Arthur is a Resident Fellow in Law and Policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC-based research institute that examines the impact of immigration on American society.  In his recent report, he questioned the fact that the CBP’s Fiscal Year report on the immigration crisis came much later on a day and time that appeared odd. “On [Friday] October 21,” he wrote, “I questioned why CBP’s September statistics on alien encounters at the Southwest border were delayed, particularly given that immigration is on the ballot in this year’s congressional midterms and that early voting for many of those races had already begun. It was only after 11 PM that night that the agency finally released those numbers, captioned ‘Nationwide Encounters.’ It’s unfortunately common in D.C. to hide bad news by dropping it after close of business on Friday (a maneuver termed a “news dump”), and those numbers contained some very bad news, indeed: The border is in freefall, spurred by the Biden administration’s immigration policies.”

To put his report into context, as Arthur put it, “if all the aliens that agents stopped [in September] were concentrated in one U.S. city, it would be the nation’s fifth largest.”

The Border Patrol reported that they encountered 98 non-U.S. citizens on their terrorist watch list.  However, based on the numbers provided by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the danger for Americans is considerably larger. The governor reports that since he launched his own border patrol — Operation Lone Star — its “multi-agency effort has led to over 317,000 migrant apprehensions and more than 21,000 criminal arrests, with more than 18,600 felony charges reported.  In the fight against fentanyl, DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety] has seized over 342 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.” Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]; it’s been killing hundreds of thousands of Americans over the past two years.

Abbott points out that the U.N. has declared the U.S./Mexico border “the most dangerous crossing in the entire world…If the Biden administration did what I just did a few weeks ago, declaring the cartels as terrorist organizations, it would trigger a federal law that would allow him to go into [the cartels’] bank accounts and get those billions of dollars the cartels are making off this crisis.”

Perhaps the Biden administration has some unfathomable reason for its lackadaisical approach to the crisis at our southern border. A recent exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation reveals that Mr. Biden turned down an offer by the president of Guatemala to help the U.S. check the illegal migrant surge. “Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said the Biden administration refused to provide Guatemala with the tools to deport illegal migrants heading to the US…he’d requested that the Biden administration move its deportation planes and buses to Guatemala for the country to use in returning illegal migrants to their home countries before they reach the U.S. He said it would save the Biden administration hefty costs of such large migration waves and allow migrants from faraway places to go home immediately.”