The man President Biden picked to secure the southern border apparently has a habit of falling asleep in meetings about securing the southern border. That’s amusing. Less amusing? Far too many migrants are dying every day because of Biden’s border crisis.
According to Politico, no less than six sources have seen Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus “fall asleep during multiple meetings, including one earlier this year on how to handle the current swell of Venezuelans crossing the border.” Magnus says that he does experience “brief periods of tiredness” as a side effect of his multiple sclerosis. Weird that this fact never came up in his Senate confirmation hearing.
Clearly, there is an effort inside the Biden administration to scapegoat Magnus for the unending chaos at the southern border. But the chaos isn’t Magnus’s fault. As Magnus tells Politico in the article, “CBP is an operational agency, not a policymaking one.”
This is true. As head of CBP, Magnus has no power to set the immigration policies of the Biden administration. All he can do is enforce what Biden tells him to implement. And right now, it is Biden’s policy to release immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border into the U.S. as quickly as possible. These migrants, assuming they make an (almost always meritless) asylum claim which will take years for the bureaucracy to process, can then go wherever they want in the U.S.
In fact, one complaint from CBP officials highlighted in the piece is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials aren’t giving illegal immigrants their “notice to appear” documents fast enough.
As long as it is the policy of the Biden administration to release as many illegal migrants into the country as fast as possible, hundreds of thousands will keep coming every month.
One item the Politico piece does get wrong, though, is where it says, “Currently most migrants who approach the border are turned away or expelled under a Trump-era public health directive.”
This is false, as even just a quick visit to CBP’s Southwest Land Border Encounters page shows. In August, the most recent month we have data for, of the 203,597 arrested for illegally crossing the southern border, just 73,152 (or 36%) were turned away through Title 42. The rest were processed under Title 8 and most of those were released into the U.S.
