THE BORDER: ‘NO IMAGINABLE SCENARIO’ TO AVOID ANOTHER DISASTER. The chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, Raul Ortiz, recently said his officers have encountered 1 million illegal border crossers in the first six months of fiscal year 2022 — that is, since Oct. 1, 2021. That is a big increase over fiscal year 2021, when there were 1.734 million encounters in the entire year. And that was a big increase over fiscal year 2020, during the pandemic, when there were 458,000 encounters, and fiscal year 2019, when there were 977,000 encounters, which was a record high at the time.
Now, with 1 million in just the first half of the year, and with the peak migration months not yet begun, the Border Patrol is overwhelmed. The flow of illegal border crossers increased virtually from the moment President Joe Biden took office after campaigning on a platform of allowing more illegal crossers to stay in the United States. Biden has made good on his promise, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal crossers to stay, relocating them on secret flights to cities all around the country.
It has been a crisis since Jan. 20, 2021. Now, Biden proposes to make it much, much worse. In the coming days, the administration will lift Title 42, a Trump-era measure that allowed the U.S. to turn back illegal border crossers on grounds of protecting the country against the coronavirus pandemic. Left-wing activists and open-borders advocates have been pressuring Biden to end Title 42 ever since the administration began. Biden resisted in the first year of his presidency. Now, he will give in to the pressure.
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The Associated Press reports the administration will rescind Title 42 in April. That is expected to create a rush of illegal crossers at the border, a prediction even the White House does not dispute. “We have every expectation that when [Title 42 is lifted], there will be an influx of people to the border,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Wednesday.
For more than a week, administration sources have been trying to prepare the nation for what is coming. This week, the New York Times reported that “homeland security officials … described contingency plans for managing as many at 18,000 encounters a day at the border.” Those officials said that not just the Department of Homeland Security but also the Federal Emergency Management Agency, plus other federal agencies, are preparing “to have on standby additional personnel, transportation and medical assistance, and temporary facilities for processing migrants.”
Whoa — 18,000 a day? That would be more than 3.2 million in the next six months. Even if the real number is half that, it would smash the record that has just been set. No wonder the emergency agencies of the U.S. government are involved. “There is no imaginable scenario for them to avoid another disaster,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration restrictions. In an email exchange, Vaughan described what is coming in a way that is so vivid and concerning, it is worth quoting in full:
Title 42 has been a convenient substitute under Biden for real border enforcement using immigration laws. They’ve had the best of both worlds — an easy way to efficiently refuse entry to enough migrants to enable them to deny the “open borders” critique, without using detention while still allowing a huge number of families and “vulnerable” migrants to enter and get work permits. But we’ve all known that it would have to end at some point since it’s linked to the pandemic conditions. Now the clock is ticking for them to come up with a plan to deal with the tsunami of new illegal border crossers from around the globe who reportedly are already flocking to Mexico in anticipation of even more lenient catch-and-release rules. There is no imaginable scenario for them to avoid another disaster. The word is out across the globe that the Biden administration likely will not send anyone home. Most likely, Biden and [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas will talk tough but indulge the migrants to the maximum extent possible. Mayorkas will talk about processing migrants, not returning them; he’ll have reception centers instead of detention, and ask for their names and fingerprints, and then release them to go where they please; he will use gimmicks to justify granting asylum and work permits to give them a faux legal status; he will promise to remove failed asylum-seekers but will devote no resources to locating them. The administration will do its best to whisk the migrants through some system. They believe that they have nothing to lose. They are betting that even without one-party rule next year, it will be too hard to remove, deport, or block legal status for the millions they have let in, and when their party regains control, they can give out the green cards and cultivate a new generation of loyal Democratic voters.
The message: It is coming. It will not be a natural disaster, not an earthquake or hurricane. It will be a man-made disaster, with the man, in this case, being Biden. And that, of course, will have political repercussions. “The stakes are high, from both a humanitarian standpoint and a political one,” wrote the New York Times. “Democrats do not want the southwest border to appear out of control in the months ahead of the midterm elections, which would fuel more Republican attacks on the Biden administration’s border policies.”
Appear out of control? How about be out of control? That is what the next months, at least, hold on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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