President Joe Biden is desperate to change the narrative on the border crisis. He wants to shift it away from “Biden’s policies caused this crisis,” which is 100% true, to “this crisis is not Biden’s fault and Republicans are exploiting migrant suffering.”
Toward that end, the Department of Homeland Security hosted an exclusive background briefing with select journalists Monday to issue the administration’s new talking points. The timing was no coincidence — it comes just before the release of August’s southwest border encounter numbers, which showed a record high 2 million immigrants had been arrested after illegally crossing the southern border this fiscal year.
Axios dutifully parroted Biden’s new line, even using the classic “Republicans pounce” trope unironically.
“The large numbers of migrants at the southern border continues to be a logistical, humanitarian and political challenge for the Biden administration,” the website reported. “Republicans have pounced on the issue, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently flying migrants and asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.”
Notice how the border crisis is no longer something caused by Biden’s catch-and-release border policies but a “logistical” challenge that Biden has to manage while those rascally Republicans “pounce.”
According to Axios, it was only the pandemic that lowered immigrant arrests in 2020 to just 460,000. Then, that number “jumped” to 1.7 million in fiscal 2021 and over 2 million for fiscal 2022. Why the sudden jump in 2021? Axios doesn’t say.
And we see a similar narrative from the New York Times, which tells us that the immigrants flooding the southern border are “part of a global movement of displaced people who are fleeing their home countries.” Oh really? When exactly did this movement begin? Is it caused by climate change?
The Times also notes there was a “spike in migration” under the Trump administration, but it never explains why that spike started, how big it was, or why it ended.
Here are the facts.
For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, immigrant arrests on the southern border were lower than they had been under President Barack Obama. Then, in December 2018, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was sworn in as Mexico’s president. Obrador had campaigned on a promise to guarantee immigrants traveling through Mexico safe passage to the United States. Deportations of immigrants traveling through Mexico quickly fell by half, and you can see in the DHS data what happened next.
There was a huge spike in encounters immediately after Obrador took office.
But then, border crossings fell and returned to normal by September. What happened? Did immigrants worldwide suddenly stop waiting to come to America in May 2019? Of course not. What happened was that Trump forced Obrador to cooperate with his Remain-in-Mexico policy. Under this policy, immigrants who claimed asylum as a defense against deportation were forced to stay in Mexico until their asylum case could be adjudicated. Once immigrants knew they would be denied easy entry into the U.S., they stopped coming in such large numbers. That is why illegal border crossing fell and stayed low through 2020.
Then, Biden was elected in November 2020 and sworn into office in January 2021. On day one of his presidency, he ended the Migrant Protection Protocols and instituted a 100-day moratorium on deportations. He then made it harder for agents to deport anyone but violent criminals, causing a sharp fall in ICE arrests and historic deportation lows.
Biden also reopened the “catch-and-release” loophole by exempting families and unaccompanied minors from Trump’s COVID-related Title 42 ban on immigrants entering the country. Biden has since steadily rolled back enforcement of Title 42, with August’s numbers showing the smallest percentage of immigrants processed under that title since it began to be enforced.
And guess what happened to the number of border apprehensions after Biden reopened the catch-and-release loophole?
After Biden reinstituted catch-and-release, the number of illegal border crossings immediately shot upward. It hasn’t come down since.
Biden and his allies in the media want you to believe there is no link between Biden’s catch-and-release policies and the persistent record highs of immigrants illegally crossing our southern border.
Don’t believe them. Believe your eyes and your common sense. Millions of immigrants are coming because they know they can make more money here than in their home countries. These are economic immigrants who have no grounds for claiming asylum.
Just read these quotes from the New York Times‘s coverage of immigrants coming from Venezuela. “In Maracaibo, a city in a once flourishing oil-rich state in western Venezuela, Ms. Villalobos, 53, said her daughter, a high school graduate, left because her two jobs, selling clothing and working at a restaurant, did not earn the family ‘even enough to buy food for a week,’” the Times reports.
What is happening in Venezuela is absolutely tragic. It is what happens when voters back far-left candidates who destroy the economy. But poverty is not grounds for asylum. Asylum is for people who are being specifically targeted for persecution.
More from the Times: “Since 2013, millions of Venezuelans have fled an economic, social and democratic crisis overseen by the country’s leftist government, one that economists have called the worst outside of war in decades. Many of those migrants fled to other nations in South America.”
So Venezuelans have been leaving Venezuela for almost a decade, but only now are they coming to the U.S.? Why? Oh, yeah, that’s right. Biden’s catch-and-release scheme means they will almost certainly be able to stay, so they come here.
More from the Times: “Two bricklayers in the city, a father and a son, left for the United States on Friday. Yudi, the wife and mother of the bricklayers, said they had left because they could no longer afford to buy food.”
Again, what is happening in Venezuela is tragic, but poverty is not grounds for an asylum claim.
Record numbers of immigrants are dying at the southern border as a direct result of Biden’s catch-and-release border policy. Our border communities are overwhelmed with immigrants who need food, shelter, healthcare, and education. Until Biden changes his policies, this crisis will only get worse.
