The Biden border crisis, explained

But how did we get here? What specifically did President Joe Biden do that caused this historic border crisis?

A flood foretold

Our story actually begins back in the fall of 2013, when researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso noticed that the number of unaccompanied children apprehended while crossing the southern border had more than doubled over the previous three years, rising from just over 16,000 in 2011 to more than 38,000 in 2013.

These researchers then visited CBP facilities across the southwest, interviewing officials who worked with migrant children on a daily basis. What the researchers found alarmed them. They warned Department of Homeland Security officials that if policies did not change, the number of migrants apprehended at the border was likely to double again, leaving CBP without the capacity to house and process them.

The federal government ignored the report, whose predictions of course came true. In 2014, 68,541 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the southern border, completely overwhelming CBP and leading to those now infamous pictures of children in cages.

So what did the researchers find that led them to predict the 2014 border crisis? Was it rising crime in Honduras? Droughts in El Salvador? Hurricanes in Guatemala?

Nope. It was none of those things. The problem lay entirely with U.S. policy at the southern border. From the report:

In other words, migrants had learned that if they got caught by U.S. officials at the southern border, not only would they not be punished, but U.S. officials would actually help them complete their journey.

While the exact details have changed over the last seven years, this “catch and release” policy is not only what caused the 2014 border crisis, but it is also what is causing the Biden border crisis today.

A loophole created

The loophole identified by the UTEP researchers was created in 2008 when President George W. Bush signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Before this law, all migrant children were treated equally when apprehended at the border, no matter what country they came from. Nearly all were returned to their country of origin.

But after the Wilberforce Act passed, children from countries other than Mexico and Canada were guaranteed not only a hearing from an immigration judge but also an automatic transfer from CBP custody to Department of Health and Human Services custody, specifically HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Wilberforce Act further instructed the ORR to place migrant children promptly “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.” This usually meant transferring migrant children to illegal immigrant family members already in the U.S. who would then never bring their child to court. They would essentially be free to live in the U.S.

The migrants exploiting the loophole did not need to know all the legalities. All they needed to understand was that friends and family who tried to enter the U.S. illegally were getting caught by CBP and then given “permisos” that allowed them to continue on to their destination.

This loophole was then expanded in 2015 when a federal judge ruled that migrant children caught at the border with their parents could not be held by the federal government for more than 20 days. Because it was impossible for CBP to process families that fast, this meant that parents caught at the border would be released into the U.S. along with their children. Now, entire families caught at the border qualified for “catch and release” into the U.S.

Enforcement outsourced

Unwilling to close this “catch and release” loophole legislatively, President Barack Obama turned to then-Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to do the job Democrats refused to do. And in July of 2014, Pena Nieto announced “Programa Frontera Sur,” which heavily increased the number of border agents on Mexico’s southern border and the number of mobile checkpoints throughout the country. The Obama administration agreed to pay Mexico more than $100 million to step up its migrant deterrence efforts.

This stepped-up enforcement worked. Apprehensions and deportations rose rapidly under Programa Frontera Sur, and what had been a flood of migrants heading to the U.S. border before deterrence began became just a trickle.

Mexico’s open borders president

The southern border with Mexico remained largely secure until 2018, when Mexico elected a far-left president who had campaigned on a pledge he would “defend migrants all over the American continent and the migrants of the world who, by necessity, must abandon their towns to find life in the United States.”

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said migrating to the U.S. was a “human right,” and he promised his government would not “continue the dirty work” of doing America’s border enforcement for it. His National Development Plan guaranteed migrants safe transit through Mexico. Deportations quickly fell by more than half, and word began to spread through Central America that the journey to the U.S. just got a lot easier.

Trump strikes back

Monthly apprehensions at the U.S. southern border began to rise in February 2019, and President Donald Trump became increasingly frustrated with Mexico’s lack of cooperation on the issue. Finally, in May, Trump threatened an across-the-board 5% increase in tariffs on Mexican imports that could rise to 25% if Mexico did not start doing more to stop migrants from coming to the southern border.

This got Obrador’s attention. In addition to promising to deploy 6,000 national guard troops on Mexico’s border, Obrador also agreed to participate in Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly known as the “remain in Mexico” policy.

Under this program, migrants from countries other than Mexico who claim asylum when they are apprehended on the southern border are returned to Mexico to wait while their asylum claim is adjudicated. By denying migrants access to the U.S., this program effectively ended the “catch and release” loophole that migrants had been exploiting since 2014. Apprehensions at the southern border rapidly fell, and approximately 70,000 migrants were returned to Mexico through this program.

While the border crisis had largely been solved by the end of 2019, the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 gave the Trump administration a powerful new tool to keep migrants out of the country. Section 265 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code empowers the surgeon general to suspend all entries from a foreign country when “there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States.” Because a COVID-19 state of emergency was declared, Trump used this “Title 42” power aggressively to return all migrants caught on the southern border back to Mexico.

America’s open borders president

Like Mexico’s far-left President Obrador, Biden also campaigned on a promise to open the country’s borders. Asked by Univision’s Jorge Ramos, “Why should Latinos trust you?” Biden responded that “if you want to flee and you are fleeing oppression, you should come.”

And once migrants claiming asylum make it into the U.S., Biden made it clear they had nothing to fear from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as long as he was president.

Asked by Telemundo’s Jose Diaz-Balart, “Should someone who is here without documents, and that is his only offense, should that person be deported?” Biden responded, “That person should not be the focus of deportation. We should fundamentally change the way we deal with things.”

Biden has fundamentally changed the way immigration policy is enforced. 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 Title 42 ban on migrants entering the country. Biden is still applying the Title 42 ban to single adults trying to cross the southern border, but most families and unaccompanied children apprehended at the border are being allowed into the country, where they are then free to continue on to their final domestic destination.

With “catch and release” back in effect, it is no mystery why Biden’s border crisis is getting worse every month.