Late Friday evening, in a classic Washington Friday news dump, President Joe Biden’s Customs and Border Protection officials released the final monthly numbers for illegal southwest border crossings for fiscal year 2022. And the numbers weren’t good.
A record high 2.38 million migrants were arrested after illegally crossing the southern border in fiscal year 2022, up 37% from last year, and up more than 400% from former President Donald Trump’s last full year in office.
CBP does not release exact data on how many of those 2.38 million migrants were released into the United States, but just 1.08 million of them were turned away at the border under Title 42, while the rest were processed under Title 8. Of those processed under Title 8, almost all of them, about 1.3 million, were released into the country to go wherever they want.
GOV. ABBOTT: BIDEN OFFICIALS HAVE NO ‘CLUE ABOUT WHAT’S GOING ON AT THE BORDER’
The chaos at the southern border caused by Biden’s catch-and-release policies was the first issue that White House pollsters identified as a weakness for Biden. As early as April 2021, just months after Biden took office, Biden pollster John Anzalone wrote a memo to White House staff noting, “Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” and, “Voters do not feel he has a plan to address the situation on the border, and it is starting to take a toll.”
Biden did eventually develop a plan for the southern border, which was to process illegal border crossers into the country as fast as possible. That only made the crisis worse.
By the summer of 2021, there were some in the White House who finally raised the idea of bringing back Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which successfully ended a border crisis caused by Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2019.
Biden even entertained the idea of bringing back Trump’s policy, “but he made it clear that he did not want the idea leaking to the media — and he did not want his name attached to it.”
The idea was leaked to the media, at which point Biden killed it.
Since then, the border crisis has only gotten worse and even Democratic voters can’t ignore the issue. This Sunday on Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan hosted a focus group of Republican, independent, and Democratic voters. That the Republican and independent voters were concerned about the border is not surprising, but here is what the Democratic voter said about the issue.
“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with helping, but we have more problems here in our country. I feel like there’s so much focus on helping immigrants, and [there’s] not enough focus on the people here that might need assistance,” the voter identified as Lashawn told Brennan. “I mean … it’s like they help who they want. Certain people, certain groups of people, they’ll help them and then they’ll neglect someone else.”
Venezuelans in Miami have similar feelings. Their neighborhoods are already crowded, which is driving up the cost of housing. “They don’t want any more people,” Democratic strategist Helena Poleo told NBC News.
Voters’ frustrations with Biden’s border crisis are not just anecdotal. A Telemundo poll of Hispanic voters in Florida found that a majority of them (50%-43%) approved of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to fly immigrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. “Too many Democrats think Hispanics like uncontrolled mass migration and they couldn’t be more wrong,” Republican strategist Giancarlo Sopo told NBC.
A similar story is playing out in Texas, where 57% of Hispanics say they prefer “increasing border security measures to stop illegal migrants from crossing,” compared to just 27% who want to allow “more illegal migrants to seek asylum in the United States.”
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Maybe Democrats are waiting till after the 2022 elections to evaluate what their party’s position should be on immigration. After all, there is not much they can do between now and Nov. 8 to convince voters they can, or even want to, restore order to the southern border.
But if Democrats lose big next month, will they finally reevaluate their open borders policies? Or will they keep their head in the sand, continue to ignore the problem, and hope voters eventually forget about it, too?
