Until recently, there was still hope the Biden administration would reverse course and bring law and order back to the southern border.
Those hopes were annihilated on Oct. 29, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released a curt, four-page memo terminating, once again, Donald Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols.
Before the COVID pandemic, the program had successfully brought order to the southern border by ending the release of illegal immigrants into the United States. Before its creation, illegal immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border would tell Customs and Border Protection agents that they feared returning to their home countries. All of these migrants had been coached on what specifically to say by human traffickers and drug cartels they paid to smuggle them to the border.
These words triggered the need for a determination by an immigration court judge as to whether the illegal immigrant in question actually deserved asylum. But since tens of thousands of migrants are exploiting this loophole every month, the immigration court system doesn’t have the capacity to hear their cases in a timely manner. The illegal immigrants were therefore released into the U.S. to unite with friends and family already here (often in the country illegally themselves) and disappear before their asylum hearing. Only about 15% would win their asylum claim, and virtually none were ever deported. Those who didn’t win their asylum claims could just live illegally in the U.S. forever.
Trump’s MPP ended this “catch and release” policy by forcing migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were considered. By cutting off illegal access to the U.S., the protocols destroyed the incentive to get caught illegally crossing the southern border. Apprehensions of migrants illegally crossing plummeted after they were implemented.
President Joe Biden ordered the program suspended on his first day in office. Apprehensions of migrants illegally crossing the border immediately skyrocketed, eventually reaching record highs. The year is not over, but already, 1.7 million illegal immigrants have been caught, and over 600,000 of these have been released into the U.S. That doesn’t even count the estimated 1,000 migrants who illegally cross the border every day without being apprehended by CBP.
There was a glimmer of hope in August when a federal judge ruled that Mayorkas failed to follow the Administrative Procedure Act when he canceled MPP with his June memo. Specifically, the court said Mayorkas failed to consider that the program had successfully made it possible for DHS to follow Section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a provision that forbids DHS from releasing illegal immigrants into the U.S.
It was rumored that there was a faction within the Biden administration that recognized the program was needed to restore order to the border, and that the court’s order might give them the leverage they needed to convince Biden to reverse course.
Mayorkas’s recent memo dashed those hopes. The memo admits that the protocols successfully discouraged illegal border crossings but then asserts that MPP only succeeded “by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals” who were forced to wait in Mexico. Nothing in the memo suggests the Biden administration gave any weight to the substantial and unjustifiable human costs suffered by American citizens from illegal immigration.
For now, there is no end in sight to the chaos on the southern border caused by Biden’s open-border immigration policies. Only a new occupant of the White House can restore American sovereignty now.
