Current and former border officials in the Trump administration warned this week of a surge of migrants to the southern border if Democratic nominee Joe Biden becomes president, adding that the tidal wave of arrivals has already begun.
Since April, the number of illegal immigrants, people arrested by Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border for sneaking in, has tripled from around 16,000 then to 47,000 in September. An average of 1,500 people are arrested across the four southern border states each day, which is higher than the 1,000 figure that former Obama-era Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said indicated a “crisis” on the border.
“You’re seeing an increase on the border of attempted illegal entries because of the Biden effect,” Tom Homan, a three-decade federal law enforcement officer who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018, told the Washington Examiner.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” said former acting Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Ron Vitiello in a phone call. “The promise of a pending reform or amnesty always drives traffic … He’s going to dismantle all of the things that are working now.”
Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said border officials would “likely see an influx” that surpasses the more than 100,000 illegal immigrants arrested in a single month at the southern border during the crisis last year.
“If we continue to provide protections under the umbrella of sanctuary cities, and other rewards — such as free healthcare, driver’s licenses, jobs — that they’re not legally authorized to have, we will further incentive a new wave of unprecedented illegal migration,” Morgan told reporters in a press conference Wednesday. “If they know that they will be released, if they know that no consequences will be applied, and they know that they will not only be protected but awarded for violating the sovereign laws of our nation, there will be nothing in place to stop them.”
Biden co-wrote his immigration plan with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, who is more liberal in his immigration views than the former vice president. The plan calls for a path to citizenship for the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States; the closing of privately run immigrant detention centers; and restarting asylum processes at the border that President Trump has largely shuttered.
“It describes in detail how he’s doing to dismantle everything that’s making the border safe now,” said Vitiello. “We saw what happened in 2018 and 2019 when there wasn’t a way to detain families … What is going to stop the Northern Triangle from caravanning all the way to the states? It’s likely to be a real mess in a year or two.”
With arrests steadily rising over the past six months, officials said the thing that is keeping the U.S. immigration system from collapse is CBP’s ability to return people immediately who have illegally crossed the border. Under a process referred to as Title 42, nearly all illegal immigrants arrested at the border are driven to border crossings and released into Mexico within hours of being arrested. Normally, a person would be taken to the closest Border Patrol station, booked in, interviewed, and held for up to 72 hours before being transferred to ICE for longer-term detention.
Title 42 was in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that no one be held in confined spaces to avoid spread of the coronavirus. The upside for CBP was that it largely freed up agents from in-custody duties.
The policy’s implementation also meant that those who are arrested will not be held in detention for days to months. A person who is immediately returned to Mexico can turn around and attempt to enter again illegally, and Border Patrol agents are seeing exactly that. Recidivism, or the rate at which the same crime is recommitted, has jumped from 7% last year to 37% this year, according to federal data released Wednesday. Homan said the cartels, whose smugglers move migrants to and over the southern border, know that those who are able to evade detection and get into the U.S. now stand a good chance at not being deported if Biden wins.
“The cartels pay attention to the media. They see the media saying, ‘Joe Biden’s got this one. Joe Biden’s up double digits. He’s gonna end private detention. He supports sanctuary cities,’” said Homan. “When you throw those types of promises out to people all over the world, why wouldn’t you want to come to the greatest country in the world? You won’t get detained or deported.”
“If Biden becomes the president, we lose the border,” Homan said.
