Democrats, Orchestrated Crisis, & an Open Southern Border

Democrats, Orchestrated Crisis, & an Open Southern Border

Overview


Democrat leftists refuse to use the word “crisis” to describe the situation that currently exists at America’s southern border, and they go to great lengths to avoid telling the truth about it. This was evidenced with comic, cringe-worthy clarity during a White House press briefing on March 18, 2021, when President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, inadvertently went off-script and used the phrase “crisis on the border” to describe the massive, uncontrolled influx of illegal migrants who, in response to Biden’s border policies, were swarming into the United States from Mexico and the Central American nations further south. In light of the Biden Administration’s many previous assurances that the border situation was not in any way a “crisis,” Psaki was asked, moments later, whether she had in fact meant to say “crisis [on] the border.” She quickly replied: “Challenges at the border.” When Psaki was then asked whether her use of the word “crisis” may have reflected a change in how the Administration viewed the migrant influx, she answered tersely: “Nope.”[1]

It was a noteworthy moment, because Psaki obviously had been caught accidentally telling a forbidden truth. Indeed, that very same month, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 173,337 illegal aliens—a huge increase over the already-enormous February total of 100,441. April and May would bring additional record hauls of border apprehensions: 178,854 and 180,034, respectively.[2] The latter was the largest number of apprehensions the nation had seen in any month on record since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002.[3] And these figures did not even include another 30,000 people or so who, each and every month, were evading capture and sneaking into the United States undetected.[4] “I would argue that it’s the biggest surge that we’ve ever seen in the history of the Border Patrol,” said National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd in April 2021.[5]

But aside from rare slips-of-the-tongue like Jen Psaki’s, “crisis” has been a prohibited word in the Democratic Party’s Biden-era lexicon vis-à-vis immigration. By contrast, just a few short years before, when Donald Trump was president, Democrats had been quite willing—indeed, eager—to sound the alarm about the “crisis” at the border. It was not a crisis of overflowing crowds of migrants swarming into the country, they claimed at the time, but rather, a crisis of what the Democrats described as the “concentration camps” wherein the Trump Administration was holding the children of illegal migrants while they awaited their immigration or asylum court hearings.[6]

What the Democrats dutifully chose not to address in the Trump era was the fact that aside from all the rhetoric, the actual crisis of that moment had been brought about by the failed “progressive” policies of President Trump’s predecessors—most notably during the eight years of Obama-Biden. Those policies had resulted in a tidal wave of migrants that Trump, for reasons of national security, was striving mightily to deal with.

Time after time during his first two years in office, President Trump attempted to address the border crisis, only to have the Democrats put up roadblocks to virtually every reform he sought to make. As a result, by the middle of 2019, America’s southern border remained just about as unsecured as it had been throughout the Obama-Biden years. In a May 30, 2019 phone briefing with members of the press, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan and Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney gave a sense of the magnitude of the problem:

Over the past 21 days, an average of over 4,500 people [per day] have crossed our border illegally or arrived at ports-of-entry without documents. In May of 2017, that number was less than 700 a day. The month of May [2019] is on pace to be the highest month in crossings in over 12 years…. At any given moment, up to 100,000 migrants are transiting Mexico on their way to the U.S. border.[7]

The harsh reality is that a significant number of those migrants were bringing nothing of any value to the United States. At least 41,696 of the illegal border-crossers who were apprehended between October of 2015 and May of 2021, for instance, had been previously arrested, either in their respective homelands or in the U.S., for offenses like assault, battery, domestic violence, burglary, robbery, larceny, driving under the influence, homicide, sexual assault, drug or weapons trafficking, and illegal entry into the United States.[8] Moreover, U.S. Border Patrol agents in 2018 seized nearly 480,000 pounds of illicit drugs—most notably marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl—in the open desert regions of the U.S.-Mexico border. That figure far exceeded the additional 370,000 pounds of drugs that were seized at official ports-of-entry by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency’s field offices in El Paso, Laredo, Tucson, and San Diego.[9]

The dimensions of the immigration crisis which the Democrats helped create, although they steadfastly denied its existence, were daunting. Tens of thousands of Central Americans simply walked into the U.S. each and every month, as though American immigration laws did not even exist. Many of them then attempted to claim asylum, the granting of which required them to provide evidence that if they were to return to their country of origin, they would likely face persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or social-group membership.[10] Because American asylum courts were paralyzed by this human volume, most of these illegals were quickly released into the U.S. interior. They were told that they should return to have their asylum cases formally adjudicated on some date in the distant future, but neither they nor the American immigration officials believed that this would ever happen. Ninety percent of the asylum seekers never showed up for those hearings.[11]

Over the years, Americans had become so accustomed to this problem and so desensitized by all the banal explanations of its causes—reigns of terror by gangs in the migrants’ home countries, widespread political corruption and economic chaos in those same nations, climate change and “extreme weather events,” etc.—that they tended to accept the tsunami of illegal migration as part of the inevitable and inexorable movement of populations away from pain and toward promise.

But this was a fiction. In fact, the problem was the product of a concerted effort by which Democratic legislators and their ideological allies in the “immigrant rights” movement sought to overwhelm and undermine America’s border-security and immigration system by importing millions of people who could be expected to eventually become reliable Democrat voters for decades to come. And after a brief interlude during which President Trump was able to take decisive, affirmative steps to protect and regulate our nation’s borders, the Biden Administration has now taken up where the Obama Administration left off in January 2017. The aim of Biden and the Democrats, in a nutshell, is to sow and nurture the seeds of a crisis that can be used as a pretext for enacting policies designed to fundamentally transform America’s population and, by logical extension, its political landscape.

This devious political tactic actually has a long pedigree as well as a name—“The Cloward-Piven Strategy”—that is derived from the surnames of its authors, the husband-and-wife team of former Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.[12] Both were longtime Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leaders who in the mid-1960s produced influential sociology treatises on how to effect radical change by “crashing the system.”

Cloward and Piven were ideological allies of the famed godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, who likewise urged activists to orchestrate various crises designed to push society into economic turmoil and panic, which in turn would lead the masses to accept bigger and more explicitly socialistic government interventions. “Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action—by using power,” wrote Alinsky.[13]

Starting in the Sixties, The Cloward-Piven Strategy was employed by radicals over the next few decades to “crash” several areas of American social life—most notably welfare “rights,” the electoral system, and home mortgages—in a way that provided a blueprint for the efforts of “progressives” to crash the immigration system today.

Crashing the Welfare System

To test out their strategy of orchestrated crisis—a strategy which today can be seen impacting the immigration debate—Cloward and Piven first focused on the U.S. welfare system, urging its beneficiaries to “overload” the system in a way that would bankrupt it. This, they reasoned, would produce a crisis that would necessitate the system’s replacement with something structurally different—i.e., “legislation for a guaranteed annual income” for all people, whether or not they were employed.[14]

Cloward and Piven laid out the details of their plan in an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” which appeared in the May 2, 1966 issue of the far-left magazine The Nation. The authors claimed that political leaders—in collaboration with their rich and powerful supporters—were trying to appease poor people with welfare benefits that were, on the one hand, far too meager to ever lift them into prosperity, but on the other hand, just substantial enough to prevent the recipients from rebelling against their capitalist exploiters and thereby jeopardizing their continued receipt of the handouts to which they had grown accustomed.[15]

In their article, Cloward and Piven proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” by means of a highly coordinated “educational campaign” consisting of “demonstrations” led by “cadres of aggressive organizers.” These activists threatened to take “legal action” if “satisfaction”—in the form of an enormous expansion of the nation’s welfare rolls—was “not given.” The authors were not at all troubled by the fact that their proposals, if enacted, had the potential to plunge city after city into bankruptcy. In fact, that was exactly what Cloward and Piven wanted. When they noted, for instance, that New York City was already “facing desperate revenue shortages”—thanks in part to the fact that “welfare expenditures [were] already second only to those for public education”—Cloward and Piven nonetheless exhorted the poor to demand entitlements that would “multiply these expenditures tenfold or more.”[16]

To lead this movement to systematically overload America’s welfare system, Cloward and Piven selected a militant black organizer named George Alvin Wiley, who in 1967 founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), an umbrella group for more than 500 chapters that would spread across the United States over the next two years. Throughout the late Sixties, Wiley’s NWRO foot soldiers burst into welfare offices nationwide, where they loudly—and sometimes violently—issued their uncompromising demands for federal cash to which they claimed to be legally “entitled.” Generating fear through “a climate of militancy” was all part of the plan. As Richard Cloward once put it, poor people would never be able to advance economically until “the rest of society is afraid of them.”[17]

In accord with Cloward and Piven’s prescription, the NWRO pushed for a “guaranteed living income” which it defined, in 1968, as $5,500 per year for every American family with four children. The following year, the NWRO raised its demand to $6,500 per family.[18] Through its aggressive activist tactics, the NWRO and its supporters extracted many of billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments across the United States. A case in point was New York City, whose welfare rolls grew from approximately 150,000 to 1.5 million people between 1960 and 1970. By the early Seventies, there were half as many NYC residents on the welfare rolls as were working in the city’s private economy. And in 1975 the city was forced to declare bankruptcy, to the delight of Cloward and Piven.[19]

But the calamity brought about by the Cloward-Piven Strategy extended far beyond the confines of New York City. Between 1965 and 1974, the number of households on the public dole nationwide increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million—even though the American economy was generally thriving at that time. As co-authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe pointed out in their bestselling 2006 book The Shadow Party, “the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements that Wiley and his followers managed to squeeze from state and local governments came very close to sinking the American economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted.”[20]

Crashing the Electoral System

Following the Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Cloward and Piven turned their gunsights on the nation’s electoral system and launched a new “Voting Rights Movement” in 1982. This movement derided popular elections as charades whose actual, hidden purpose was to persuade the average person to engage in meaningless “voter activity” that would give him a false sense of participation in the American political process—much like the welfare system had allegedly been designed, according to Cloward and Piven, to give poor people a false sense of protection from economic calamity.

As Cloward and Piven saw things, welfare checks and ballots were nothing more than bones and scraps to be fed to the poor and powerless, so as to distract them from the ugly reality that they were destined to be impoverished and politically impotent forever. The real path by which the poor could gain liberation and political influence, Cloward and Piven believed, was revolution.[21]

In their 1977 book, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Cloward and Piven asserted that “as long as lower-class groups abided by the norms governing the electoral–representative system, they would have little influence.… [I]t is usually when unrest among the lower classes breaks out of the confines of electoral procedures that the poor may have some influence.” Such unrest, they explained, could take any of various different forms—e.g., “strikes,” “riots,” “crime,” “incendiarism,” “massive school truancy,” “worker absenteeism,” “rent defaults,” and other expressions of “mass defiance” or “institutional disruption.”[22]

Like their predecessors in the Welfare Rights Movement, the new voting-rights crusaders whom Cloward and Piven inspired viewed the Democratic Party as an entity that would be receptive to their aims, and thus as the party with which they should ally themselves.[23]

In a December 1982 article titled “A Movement Strategy to Transform the Democratic Party,” which initially appeared in the radical publication Ideas for Action and was later reprinted in the left-wing journal Social Policy, Cloward and Piven called for activists to flood America’s voter-registration rolls and polling places with countless millions of new voters, particularly from the underclass, all belligerently demanding their right to participate in the electoral process. The authors understood that any effort to suddenly and swiftly add massive numbers of new names to the voter rolls would inevitably result in the appearance of many names that were either invalid or difficult to verify.[24]

And that is precisely what Cloward and Piven wanted, because they knew that such a situation would inevitably spark Republican efforts to purge invalid names from the voter rolls, to require the presentation of Voter ID documents at polling places, to make registration procedures more cumbersome so as to minimize the possibility of fraud, and so forth. And they knew, moreover, that they would then be able to condemn such measures as “voter-suppression” schemes designed to “disenfranchise” poor people and minorities. Those condemnations, in turn, could be used to ignite “a political firestorm over democratic rights”—a firestorm led by voting-rights activists storming America’s election boards and polling stations like George Wiley’s welfare activists had stormed social-services offices several years earlier. Wrote Cloward and Piven: “By staging rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins … over every new restriction on [voter] registration procedures, a protest movement can dramatize the conflict…. Through conflict, the registration movement will convert registering and voting into meaningful acts of collective protest.”[25]

The most infamous exponent of Cloward and Piven’s flood-the-voter-rolls strategy was the now-defunct community organization ACORN, which in the early to mid-2000s was implicated in numerous schemes involving the falsification and destruction of voter-registration forms, the forging of signatures, the registration of dead or non-existent individuals, and the registration of convicted felons in states where they were legally ineligible to vote. In ACORN’s fraud-ridden 2008 voter-registration drives, some 400,000 bogus registrations had to be thrown out. On the eve of election day, ACORN was under investigation for voter-registration fraud in at least 13 states.[26]

Additional key players in the voter-registration movement were Project Vote, an ACORN front group established in 1982 by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett, and Human SERVE, also founded in 1982 by Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.[27]

All three of these organizations—ACORN, Project Vote, and Human SERVE—lobbied aggressively on behalf of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, most commonly known as the “Motor-Voter” law, which President Bill Clinton signed in ’93.[28] At the White House signing ceremony for this bill, both Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were standing behind the president in a place of high honor and distinction.[29] Piven, for her part, was afforded an opportunity to personally address those in attendance.[30]

David Horowitz and Richard Poe summarized the practical effects of the Motor-Voter law in The Shadow Party, where they wrote: “The Motor-Voter eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making it easy for voters to register but difficult [for election authorities] to determine the validity of new registrations. Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a driver’s license or to apply for welfare or unemployment benefits.”[31] The law explicitly stated that it covered not only beneficiaries of state public assistance programs, but also those who received aid from federal initiatives like: (a) “the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food-Stamp program); (b) the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); (c) the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF, formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC); (d) the Medicaid program; and (e) the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).”[32] The heavy emphasis on people who were dependent on government assistance had enormous political implications, because such individuals tended heavily to support Democrats in political elections.

In his 2004 book, Stealing Elections, author John Fund pointed out the following key provisions of the Motor-Voter law: “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in clearing their rolls of ‘deadwood’—people who had died or moved, or been convicted of crimes.”[33]

The Motor-Voter bill did indeed cause America’s voter rolls to become swamped with invalid registrations signed in the names of deceased, ineligible, or non-existent people—what John Fund called “an explosion of phantom voters”—thus opening the door to unprecedented levels of voter fraud and “voter disenfranchisement” claims that followed in subsequent elections during the 1990s, and reached an apex in the Florida recount crisis in the 2000 presidential election. Emblematic of the problem was the fact that on the eve of that election, state officials in Indiana discovered that fully 20 percent of the names on their registered-voter rolls were either duplicates or otherwise invalid.[34]

A cloud of doubt and confusion hanging over elections was exactly what Cloward and Piven and their allies wanted. One such ally was the leftist billionaire financier George Soros, who declared, regarding the 2000 election: “President Bush came to office without a clear mandate. He was elected president by a single vote on the Supreme Court.” As Horowitz and Poe observed in The Shadow Party: “Once again, the ‘flood-the-rolls’ strategy had done its work. Cloward, Piven, and their disciples ha[d] introduced a level of fear, tension, and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.”[35]

The trend toward chaos and the promotion of public distrust in political elections continued to grow in the years that followed. In 2012, for example, the Pew Center for the States estimated that approximately 24 million of the roughly 150 million voter registrations in the U.S. were invalid. That figure included more than 1.8 million dead people who were listed as eligible voters, plus about 2.75 million who were registered in more than one state, plus another 12 million whose voter records had incorrect addresses.[36]

Crashing the Mortgage-Lending Industry

While Cloward and Piven envisioned their “strategy” as being launched by street radicals, the housing-market crisis of 2008, which was likewise caused by a system overload—in this case the overload of the mortgage industry with bad loans to underqualified borrowers—featured radical Democrats inside government now playing the role that “activists” had played in the crises of the ’60s and ’70s.

The roots of the 2008 crisis can be traced back to 1977, when progressive Democrats in Congress—seeking to help low-income nonwhites raise their lagging rates of homeownership—passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) with near unanimity. Signed into law by Democrat President Jimmy Carter, this federal statute required banks to make special efforts to lend money to minority borrowers—particularly mortgagors—of meager to modest means.[37]

The CRA was founded upon a planted axiom with far-reaching implications—that government intervention is necessary to counteract the fundamentally racist and inequitable nature of American society generally, and of the free market specifically. The profound implications of that premise began to hit critical mass in the early 1990s, when studies showing disparate mortgage-loan approval rates for blacks and whites made sensational headlines in the media. In 1992, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released the results of
a seminal study, commonly known as the Boston Fed Study, which found that when whites and blacks with equivalent incomes applied for mortgages, the black applicants were denied at significantly higher rates. In reaction to the study, Attorney General Janet Reno warned in 1994 that “no bank” would be “immune” to an aggressive Justice Department campaign to punish discrimination in lending practices.[38]

Though the conclusions of the Boston Fed Study were thoroughly discredited by various authoritative sources—including the Federal Reserve itself—in the months and years that followed,[39] leftists in Congress and in the Clinton Administration were determined to transform the CRA from an outreach effort into a strict quota system. Under this arrangement, if a bank failed to meet its quota for loans to low-income minorities, it ran a high risk of failing to earn a “satisfactory” CRA rating from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Such a failure, in turn, could derail the bank’s efforts to open a new branch, relocate a home office, make an acquisition, or merge with another financial institution. From a practical standpoint, then, banks had no recourse other than to drastically lower their standards on down-payments and underwriting, and to approve many loans even to borrowers with weak credit credentials.[40]

In 1993, the Clinton Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), backed by “progressives” in Congress, began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers who had turned down a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants, regardless of their reasons for doing so. HUD also pressured the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest sources of housing finance in the United States, to earmark a rising number of their own loans for low-income borrowers.

The soon-to-be-infamous radical group ACORN, meanwhile, acting in coordination with its Democratic Party allies in Congress, aggressively pushed this same Clinton/Democrat agenda. In a 1991 protest against efforts to scale back the CRA, for instance, ACORN activists forcibly occupied the House Banking Committee room. In 1995, ACORN was the driving force behind a regulatory revision that greatly expanded the CRA. And ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to aggressively promote subprime loans for low-income minority borrowers. These loans were characterized by inflated interest rates in order to compensate lenders for the high credit risk they were incurring.[41]

Over time, the landscape of the mortgage-lending industry was completely transformed. Subprime loans, as well as other types of nontraditional loans (such as zero-down payment loans), became ever-more prevalent. The situation was exacerbated further by the fact that many banks securitized the risky loans—i.e., bundled them together and sold them to third-party investors. From 2000 to 2005, private securitization of home and commercial mortgages grew tenfold; many of these securitized loans were subprime mortgages. The result was a full-blown financial crisis characterized by high unemployment rates and countless home foreclosures—particularly among minority owners who had been lured into buying homes they could not afford. “It was ultimately the skyrocketing rates of mortgage delinquencies and defaults,” writes Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell, “that were like heavy rain in the mountains that caused the flooding downstream…. Government was not passively inefficient. It was actively zealous in promoting risky mortgage lending practices.”[42]

Targeting the U.S. Immigration System

When The Cloward-Piven Strategy was originally applied to welfare rights in the 1960s and ’70s, its principal architects were a pair of radical academic outsiders and their socialist comrades in community organizations like ACORN—all of them seeking to remake a portion of American society in a Marxist image. When the Strategy was subsequently applied to the Voting Rights Movement in the 1980s and ’90s, these same academic outsiders and their ACORN-affiliated allies again led the way, though this time their efforts were supplemented in a major way by Democrats in Congress. By contrast, in the home mortgage crisis of the 1990s the leading actors were figures inside government, while activist radicals provided support from without.

The same thing is happening today, as the Biden presidency shifts into high gear and The Cloward-Piven Strategy is being employed yet again. This time, the Strategy’s architects are immensely powerful Democrats in the Executive and Legislative branches of government. To achieve radical social change and entrench their own political power for generations to come, these Democrats—with support from left-wing activist judges and radical immigrant-rights groups—are prepared to plunge America’s border-security bureaucracy into a crisis that would provide them with a pretext for advocating, as a “solution” to that crisis, the passage of an amnesty or “path-to-citizenship” bill. The enactment of such legislation would, in turn, create a massive bloc of new Democrat voters virtually overnight.

When America’s southern border was overrun by people crossing into the United States in huge numbers during the Obama-Biden years (2009-17), those migrants, for the most part, did not present themselves to American authorities at any of the dozens of official ports-of-entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, where they could easily have accessed food, water, and medical care if necessary. Instead, they chose to breach the border at locations somewhere between those ports-of-entry—in the midst of an inhospitable, arid desert—where, as soon as they had planted their feet firmly on American soil, they actively sought out U.S. border authorities, in hopes of getting taken into custody.[43]

Why? Because the migrants knew that if they were to apply for asylum at a port-of-entry, their chances of being approved, if they hailed from Mexico or Central America, would have been poor.[44] Indeed, approximately 90 percent of asylum cases were found, by American courts, to be without merit. And why was that? Because their cases were based, for the most part, not upon the historically legitimate reason for seeking asylum—i.e., political protection from totalitarianism or oppression—but rather, upon the hope of finding work and “a better life” in the United States.

Those wanting to crash our immigration system realized that the U.S. media would be eager to make the “human stories” of such illegal migrants compelling and sympathetic, particularly if young children were involved. They also understood that America’s immigration courts were already overextended and would not possibly be able to hear an additional huge backload of cases. Moreover, they knew that if aspiring asylees showing up with children—who may or may not have been theirs—could somehow manage to sneak illegally into U.S. territory before making their asylum requests, they were unlikely to be sent back to Mexico right away. Rather, they stood a good chance of being released into the U.S. interior, along with a notice instructing them to report for a formal asylum hearing at some date in the very distant future. As one Border Patrol agent told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo in April 2019: “They basically walk until they see an agent and then they turn themselves in…. They want to get processed, given the papers, then they go north and they have legal papers to be wherever they’re going to be at.”[45]

In other words, illegal migrants had plenty of time to simply disappear, never again to be seen by American immigration authorities.[46]

The first six calendar months of Donald Trump’s presidency—February through July of 2017—saw the number of southern border apprehensions dwindle by about 50 percent from the 2016 Obama-Biden levels, to a range of between 12,000 and 19,000 per month.[47] This decrease was largely a result of Trump’s clearly articulated positions regarding border security and immigration-law enforcement. But by midway through 2017, it became increasingly clear that congressional Democrats and activist judges nationwide were passionately committed to: (a) condemning and obstructing Trump’s attempts to implement the border-security measures he favored, and (b) manufacturing a crisis on the southern border that would throw American politics into chaos.

Following are 5 notable examples of the Democrats’ obstructionist strategy:

(1) On January 25, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that called for the denial of federal grants to “sanctuary cities,” where police and other public-sector employees were barred from notifying the federal government about the presence of illegal aliens residing in their communities.[48] Democrats loudly condemned this order.  Rep. Norma Torres, for instance, described Trump’s action as a “cynical,” “dangerous,” and “ill-conceived” measure whose principal purpose was to “appease the far right at the expense of our [American] values, security, and economic well-being.” Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham lamented that Trump’s policy would “turn neighbor against neighbor” and “undermine the efforts of police departments.” And Rep. Juan Vargas said that such “shameful” and “divisive” measures would “betray our nation’s values.”[49]

In March 2017, no fewer than 33 congressional Democrats signed a letter demanding that President Trump “rescind” his “unconstitutional” executive order. That same year, Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the Republican-sponsored “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act,” which sought to codify Trump’s executive order via the legislative process. And in an effort to affirmatively counter the intentions of that bill, Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley of Illinois introduced the “Safeguarding Sanctuary Cities Act of 2017,” which stipulated that federal financial assistance could not be denied to any state or local government for reason of its noncompliance with federal immigration authorities. Quigley’s bill drew 52 Democrats as co-sponsors.[50]

(2) In another January 2017 executive order, President Trump called for the construction of a wall to prevent illegal northward migration across America’s southern border. But congressional Democrats vocally condemned the plan.  Rep. Darren Soto, for one, stated that “this wall … will only further escalate the racial divisions and tensions created at the outset of Trump’s campaign.” Rep. Salud Carbajal depicted the proposed wall as “a multi-billion-dollar symbol of xenophobia and hate.” And Rep. Vicente Gonzalez said that “building a wall along our southern border will … be a shameful act in front of the international community that is watching us.”[51]

(3) In an effort “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” President Trump issued a January 25, 2017 executive order temporarily suspending most travel and refugee admissions to the U.S. from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria. These were precisely the same seven countries that had been named in the Visa Waiver Program Improvement & Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, which passed easily through Congress and was signed into law by former President Obama in December 2015.[52] Trump’s order also created an “extreme vetting” process for visitors from those nations.[53]

But just three days later, federal judge Ann Donnelly—who had been appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York by President Obama—issued an emergency stay to prevent the removal of any individuals arriving in the United States from the seven aforementioned countries.[54] On February 3, federal judge James Robart of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) suspending the enforcement of Trump’s executive order nationwide.[55] And six days after that, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Robart’s TRO.[56] Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, were united in their scorn. A teary-eyed Senator Charles Schumer called Trump’s executive order “mean-spirited and un-American,” while Senator Bernie Sanders described it as “un-American and unconstitutional.”[57]

(4) In February 2017, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency executed a series of raids in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Antonio, and New York City, targeting convicted criminals, gang members, and people who had re-entered the United States after being legally deported. Major Democratic political figures swiftly denounced the operations. Senator Schumer, for one, was “troubled by the lack of transparency and potential due process violations surrounding ICE’s most recent enforcement actions.”[58] Similarly, Rep. Luis Gutierrez complained that “the goal of such policies is to inject fear into immigrant communities, frighten families and children, and drive immigrants farther underground.”[59]

(5) On September 5, 2017, Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that in six months, the Trump Administration would be rescinding the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which former President Barack Obama had enacted by means of a 2012 executive action designed to prevent the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who had first come to the U.S. as minors. Sessions characterized the DACA program as “an unconstitutional exercise of the executive branch.”[60]

But no sooner had Sessions made his announcement, than federal judges in San Francisco and New York issued preliminary injunctions requiring the Trump Administration to continue renewing DACA permits.[61] Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, rushed to condemn Trump’s plan. Rep. Norma Torres characterized it as “a betrayal of American values and a needless attack on thousands of hardworking young people who want nothing more than an opportunity to contribute to this country.”[62] Rep. Albio Sires described “the President’s cruel and reprehensible decision to end DACA” as yet “another manifestation of [his] anti-immigrant rhetoric that has emboldened hatred, racism, and bigotry.”[63] Rep. Salud Carbajal called the action “unconscionable and incompatible with our American values.”[64] And Rep. Adriano de Jesus Espaillat charged that Trump had “declared all-out war on immigrant youth.”[65]

As the obstructionism of congressional Democrats and activist courts grew ever-more obvious, migrants began to cross the U.S. border illegally in much larger numbers. Between August 2017 and February 2018, the number of such illegals who were apprehended in U.S. territory ranged between 20,000 and 30,000 per month,[66] a significant rise from the 12,000-to-19,000 range that had been customary during Trump’s previous six months in office. When the figure reached nearly 40,000 apprehensions in both March and April of 2018,[67] the Trump Administration attempted to take action. Specifically, Attorney General Sessions announced on April 6th that the government would thenceforth pursue a “zero-tolerance” policy whereby every adult caught illegally crossing America’s southern border—or even attempting to do so—would be subject to criminal prosecution.[68]

In response to this announcement, the Democratic Party launched a vicious propaganda campaign against President Trump and members of his Administration, accusing them of mistreating poor, defenseless migrants and their young children in the most abominable ways. Particularly widespread were charges that the Administration was pursuing a policy of forced “family separation” whereby youngsters were routinely being “torn” or “ripped” from the arms of their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. Former Vice President Joe Biden, for one, denounced “this Administration’s policies that literally rip babies from the arms of their mothers and fathers” as emblems of “one of the darkest moments in our history.” Senator Bernie Sanders said, “You don’t rip little children away from the arms of their mother.” And Senator Elizabeth Warren proclaimed: “President Trump seems to think the only way to have immigration rules is [to] rip parents from their families … and to put children in cages.”[69]

In June 2018, some 111 House Democrats signed a letter urging the top two members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security to bar the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from funding the enforcement of Trump’s “inhumane” and “misguided” policy of “family separation” at the border.[70]

Supplementing these efforts were media outlets nationwide, which disseminated a massive array of stories about, and images of, weeping mothers and children being forcibly separated from one another at America’s southern border. One of the more iconic pictures was a Time magazine cover that showed a small girl crying in terror as she seemed to be looking up at the unsympathetic face of Donald Trump, whose image had been positioned before her by the publishers of Time. The caption read, “Welcome to America.”[71]

Emotional appeals like these were highly successful at putting Republicans on the defensive. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins told CBS’s Face the Nation that separating children from their parents was “traumatizing” to the youngsters and “contrary to our values in this country.”[72] House Speaker Paul Ryan said that “legislation is necessary” because “we don’t want kids to be separated from their parents.”[73] And former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stated that President Trump “should end this heartless policy.”[74] 

The History of “Family Separation”

The highly inflammatory charge that migrant children were being cruelly separated from their parents at the border was the centerpiece of the Democrats’ radical strategy to “crash” America’s immigration system and torpedo in particular President Trump’s efforts to enforce a sound immigration policy. Moreover, the cynical use of these children was illustrated by the fact, as testified to by immigration officers, that many of those youngsters were in effect “rented out” to illegal migrants who used them as props in their efforts to obtain asylum. In July 2019, for example, The Washington Examiner reported that “in a pilot program, approximately 30% of rapid DNA tests of immigrant adults who were suspected of arriving at the southern border with children who weren’t theirs revealed the adults were not related to the children.”[75]

The emotionally charged issue of illegal immigrant children being separated from their parents actually dates back to 1985—a time when the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) agency had jurisdiction over all immigration matters in the United States. That year, a number of activist organizations—the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, and the National Center for Youth Law—joined the Phoenix-based law firm of Streich Lang in filing a class-action lawsuit called Flores v. Meese, which challenged an INS policy that prevented unaccompanied illegal-alien children from being released to any U.S.-based adults other than their parents or legal guardians. The case centered around a 15-year-old girl named Jenny Lisette Flores, whose mother was an illegal Salvadoran immigrant. As the Center for Immigration Studies explains: “[Jenny] was being detained by INS. Jenny’s mother didn’t want to pick her up, as she feared bringing herself before INS would result in her deportation. INS would not release Flores to her cousins—they said that only legal guardians, for the sake of the child’s safety, could pick her up.”[76]

In 1988, Judge Robert Kelleher of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled in favor of making it easier to release minors to the care of adults who were not the youngsters’ parents or guardians. But in 1990, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Kelleher’s decision and upheld the original INS policy. Then, in 1991, all eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals met en banc and issued a 7-4 decision reversing the three-judge panel’s decision and reaffirming Judge Kelleher’s 1988 position.[77]

In 1992 this same case went to the Supreme Court, where it was known as Reno v. Flores. In 1993 the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in favor of reversing the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision and restoring the original INS policy from pre-1988. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority: “Where the Government does not intend to punish the child, and where the conditions of Governmental custody are decent and humane, such custody surely does not violate the Constitution.”[78]

Notwithstanding this emphatic decision by the nation’s highest court, immigration activist groups continued to file lawsuits and to apply political pressure aimed at restoring Judge Kelleher’s 1988 standard. Eventually, in 1997, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner—fulfilling the wishes of the Clinton Administration—signed a settlement of the Flores case whereby the government agreed that it would thenceforth strive to place unaccompanied alien children in the “least restrictive” setting by releasing them, “without unnecessary delay,” to—in order of preference—their parents, legal guardians, other adult relatives, or other individuals designated by the parents or guardians.[79]

In 2003, Congress disbanded the INS and transferred the agency’s responsibilities to several entities within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The task of placing alien minors with their parents or other caretakers, however, was assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). But immigrant-rights activists persisted in complaining that the DHS, HHS, and ORR were not adequately complying with the terms of the 1997 Flores settlement.

Finally, in 2015, California federal district court judge Dolly Gee, an appointee of President Obama, ruled that because detention centers in Texas had failed to meet the standards laid out in Flores, the Obama Administration would now be required to release—within 20 days—all children apprehended while crossing the border illegally, whether or not they were accompanied by an adult. “In other words,” the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) subsequently explained, “now all minors in detention, whether or not they were with their parents, couldn’t be detained for more than three weeks. This ruling laid the groundwork for the [policy] in which children are released while their parents can still be detained awaiting hearings—hence, the ‘separation’ of families. The alternative is simply releasing the entire family after three weeks or less.”[80] It should be noted that Obama’s legal team had the option of fighting Gee’s decision by filing appeals with higher courts, but instead it signed an agreement to put the judge’s decision into action.

The alternatives identified by CIS were precisely the same narrow alternatives that were open to the Trump Administration in April 2018, when it implemented its new “zero tolerance” policy vis-a-vis illegal entry.

In May and June of 2018, the number of apprehensions of illegal border-crossers continued to range roughly between 35,000 and 40,000 people per month.[81] The Democratic and media condemnations of President Trump continued apace as well.

Finally, on June 20, 2018, Trump, under mounting political pressure not only from Democrats but also from members of his own party, signed an executive order ending the practice of separating children from their parents at the border, while keeping the zero-tolerance policy intact. In other words, it would now be deemed permissible to indefinitely detain adult migrants together with their children. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” said Trump. The president’s order also required the Defense Department to provide and, “if necessary,” construct facilities in which to house and care for the families.[82]

The left was not at all mollified by Trump’s gesture, however. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for one, complained that because the president’s new policy continued to require that migrant families be held in detention centers, it was treating them “like criminals.”[83] Karen Tumlin, director of legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, said: “The president doesn’t get any Brownie points for moving from a policy of locking up kids and families separately to a policy of locking them up together. Let’s be clear: Trump is making a crisis of his own creation worse.”[84] And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi charged that President Trump’s executive order merely “seeks to replace one form of child abuse with another” by “pav[ing] the way for the long-term incarceration of families in prison-like conditions.”[85]

Overwhelming the Immigration System

Notwithstanding President Trump’s stated intentions, in practice it became wholly impossible for the federal government to keep migrant families together in detention centers for any extended period of time—simply because their numbers were far greater than what the detention centers could hold. Thus, as The New York Times would report soon thereafter: “The government has been letting thousands of detained migrants go free each week because it lacks enough beds to hold them in family detention facilities.”[86]

The Times further noted that the migrants, for their part, were quick to learn the loopholes which they could exploit in order to get the most favorable disposition for themselves and their families:

The majority [of migrants] know to request asylum at the border, either at an official port of entry or when they surrender to border agents shortly after sneaking into the country from Mexico. They know that they are unlikely to remain detained if they travel with a child and that they have a better shot at fending off deportation when they come with a child…. Customs and Border Protection officials believe that the various legal rulings preventing families from being detained have helped solidify the message to smugglers, who roam villages offering to guide people to the United States, that adults who come with a child are protected from deportation.[87]

The Washington Post concurred that illegal Central American migrants were streaming into the United States “typically in groups of one parent and one child,” because they understood that “such pairings all but ensure the family will be processed quickly and released from U.S. custody in a matter of days.”[88] “[T]he practical effect,” said a New York Times piece, “is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. [But the] courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all.”[89]

In July and August of 2018, apprehensions of illegal border-crossers continued to range between 30,000 and 40,000 per month.[90]

That summer as well, Democrats opened up yet another avenue in their attacks against President Trump and the border-security bureaucracy, now alleging that the heavy-handedness of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in dealing with vulnerable migrants was sufficient cause for that agency’s abolition.[91] As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told CNN’s Chris Cuomo: “I don’t think ICE today is working as intended. I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues.”[92] Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Facebook post, “The President’s deeply immoral actions have made it obvious that we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our values.”[93]  Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin claimed that “ICE is tearing apart families and ripping the moral fabric of our nation.”[94] And Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon said: “People should be treated with compassion and respect. ICE is simply not doing that. Trump and his Administration have made the agency so toxic that it’s time to abolish ICE, and start over.”[95]

In mid-October of 2018, a separate effort to overwhelm America’s border-control apparatus was launched from Central America when a large caravan—composed of several thousand people from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—began migrating northward for the declared purpose of defiantly walking across America’s southern border and taking up residence in the United States. The effort was spearheaded by Pueblo Sin Fronteras (PSF)—meaning “People Without Borders”—a nonprofit organization whose overriding objective is to “abolish borders” and facilitate the free, unregulated movement of Central American migrants into the United States.[96]

In an October 21, 2018 press release, PSF accused President Trump and the U.S. of using “repressive tactics” to inflict “fear and racism” on the people of Central America. Moreover, the organization demanded that Mexico declare itself a “sanctuary country” with wide-open borders.[97]

Between October 2018 and January 2019, there was a noticeable upsurge in apprehensions of illegals just north of America’s southern border, with an average of 50,398 per month. This figure included, on average, 5,020 unaccompanied children as well as 20,387 single adults and 24,991 members of “family units.”[98]

The fact that the “family units” figure was substantially higher than the others, served as evidence of what the Center for Immigration Studies described as “the rapidly growing number of border infiltrators using children as a ticket to release into the interior.”[99] It was also evidence of a widening scam, featuring thousands of documented cases of adult migrants falsely claiming to be the parents of the children traveling with them.[100] Clearly, the people of Latin America understood that the loopholes in America’s immigration and asylum system could be easily exploited. As Gallup reported in early 2019: “A full 5 million [Latin Americans] who are planning to move in the next 12 months say they are moving to the U.S.”[101]

On January 8, 2019, President Trump attempted to make his case for border security directly to the American people. In an Oval Office address in which he warned of “a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border,” the president stated, among other things:

  • “Every day, Customs and Border Protection agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.”
  • “Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone. Ninety percent of which floods across from our southern border.”
  • “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.”
  • “[C]hildren are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs. One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.”
  • “Some have suggested [that] a [physical] barrier [at the border] is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is [for] the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.”[102]

But congressional Democrats dismissed Trump’s message as nothing more than an exercise in bigotry, fear-mongering, and, ironically—given the role that The Cloward-Piven Strategy now played in their own political maneuvering—“staging a crisis.” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, for example, said: “This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear, and divert attention from the turmoil in his Administration.”[103] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise accused President Trump of “manufacturing a crisis” by means of “cruel and counterproductive policies” that scapegoated “the women and children at the border” as “a security threat.”[104] And Senator Bernie Sanders said in a video statement: “Mr. President, we don’t need to create artificial crises. We have enough real ones.”[105]

That same month—February 2019—the total number of illegal aliens apprehended near America’s southern border shot up to 66,883.[106] This figure included 6,817 unaccompanied children,[107] 23,536 single adults, and 36,530 “family unit” members.[108] The latter figure (for “family unit” members) was 51% higher than the corresponding January figure had been.[109]

The steep upward trend in border-area apprehensions continued in March 2019, when the total reached 92,833,[110] of whom 57 percent were members of “family units.”[111] Border Protection commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan warned that “the system is well beyond capacity and remains at the breaking point.”[112]

April of 2019 brought more of the same: 99,273 apprehensions[113] that included 8,880 unaccompanied children,[114] 31,680 single adults, and an astounding 58,713 “family unit” members.[115] As the Families & Children Care Panel of Customs & Border Protection (CBP), a component of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, noted in its Final Emergency Interim Report that same month: “By far, the major ‘pull factor’ is the current practice of releasing with a NTA [Notice To Appear in court at a later date] most illegal migrants who bring a child with them.”[116]

In May 2019, the number of border-area apprehensions reached 132,856,[117] among whom were 11,475 unaccompanied minors,[118] 36,900 single adults, and a previously unimaginable 84,486 people in “family units.”[119] Noting that “the numbers for May prove the crisis is only getting worse,” U.S. Border Patrol Chief of Law Enforcement Operations Brian Hastings pointed out that as many as 60 percent of all Border Patrol agents were being pulled from their customary law-enforcement duties and shifted into roles where they were providing illegal migrants with housing, food, and transportation.[120]

And how did Democrats respond to this growing catastrophe within America’s immigration system? By doing everything in their power to exacerbate it. Not only did almost all the announced candidates in the first of the Democratic Party’s presidential primary debates in June 2019 indicate that they wanted to “decriminalize” illegal border crossings, but they also agreed that American taxpayers should now be required to pay for the healthcare coverage of every illegal alien residing in the United States.[121]

For example:

  • When a reporter in May 2019 asked presidential candidate Joe Biden whether illegal immigrants “should be entitled to federal benefits like Medicare [and] Medicaid,” Biden replied: “Look, I think that anyone who is in a situation where they are in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for.”
  • When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked presidential candidate Kamala Harris whether she supported granting taxpayer-funded benefits “to people who are in this country illegally,” Harris responded unequivocally: “Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.”
  • Yet another Democratic presidential candidate, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, likewise spoke forcefully in support of guaranteed healthcare coverage for illegals: “You will hear some critics who say we can’t afford to give everyone healthcare. I have a simple answer. It’s not a problem of money from my point of view. There’s plenty of money in this world, there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.”
  • Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled a “Medicare-for-all” plan that “would cover every U.S. resident” regardless of immigration status. His proposal was backed by such high-profile Democrats as Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.

Immigration policy became open political warfare as President Trump kept trying to find some way to circumvent the Democrats’ uncompromising devotion to open borders and to policies that placed an unsustainable burden on the immigration system.

Then, in May 2019, there was a major breakthrough. Trump implemented the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a government action stipulating that foreign individuals traveling northward through Mexico and seeking asylum in the U.S. without proper documentation, could be forced to remain in Mexico while waiting for their asylum hearings to eventually make their way onto the court calendar.[122] In short, American border agencies would no longer have to release migrants into the U.S. prior to their asylum hearings.[123]

In May 2019 as well, President Trump announced that he would impose stiff tariffs against Mexico if the latter took no measures to stem the flow of illegal migrants to the United States. In response to Trump’s threat, that summer the Mexican government deployed its own National Guard for the express purpose of thwarting unregulated northward migration to the U.S.[124]

On July 15, 2019, President Trump announced his plan to implement a policy that would bar most migrants from applying for asylum after illegally crossing America’s southern border, unless they had first been unsuccessful in seeking asylum in a “safe” country which they traversed on their way to the United States.[125] Thus, would-be asylees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Nicaragua would be ineligible for asylum in the U.S. unless they had first applied in Mexico and been rejected.

While Attorney General William Barr, who had taken office in February 2019, maintained the legality of the Trump Administration’s newly announced policy, advocates of open borders immediately rose up in protest. “The Trump Administration is trying to unilaterally reverse our country’s legal and moral commitment to protect those fleeing danger,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “This new rule is patently unlawful and we will sue swiftly.”[126] Congressional Democrats, of course, were no less militant. “[T]he Trump Administration announced they will seek to undermine our nation’s asylum laws,” wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “This cruel and anti-immigrant Administration is overreaching and stacking the deck against asylum seekers by limiting their rights to due process under our laws. This is simply not who we are as a country.”[127]

Notwithstanding these criticisms, the Trump Administration signed “safe-country” asylum agreements with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras between July and September of 2019.[128] These agreements—in conjunction with the aforementioned Migrant Protection Protocols and threatened tariffs against Mexico—were a crucial part of the remarkable process by which President Trump single-handedly figured out how to circumvent the relentless obstructionism of the Democrats. What Congress had failed for decades to get done, Trump himself achieved on the diplomatic front in just a few months, with no help whatsoever from Congress. It was one of the most extraordinary political accomplishments in modern American history.

Biden Presses Forward with the Orchestrated Crisis Agenda

Ever since the Biden Administration ascended to power in January 2021, Democrats have continued to embrace the same overarching objective they pursued during the Trump years: the advancement of policies designed to overwhelm America’s immigration system with a massive tidal wave of newcomers who, upon eventually acquiring the right to vote in political elections, will be far more likely to support Democrats rather than Republicans. Toward that end, Biden and his party have purposefully and aggressively sought to promote chaos along America’s southern border—chaos supplemented by the effects of legislation and executive actions crafted to permanently tilt the political advantage toward the Democratic Party.

Amnesty in a Variety of Forms

When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he made it clear throughout his campaign that he was in favor of granting citizenship to virtually every illegal alien residing in the United States—roughly 11 million people, by Biden’s estimate.[129] When discussing this issue, he gave particular emphasis to those illegals affected by former President Obama‘s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—i.e., people who had come to the U.S. unlawfully as minors and were still under the age of 31 as of June 2012.[130] DACA allowed hundreds of thousands of such individuals to gain temporary legal status, work permits, access to publicly funded social services, and protection from deportation.

Biden also stressed the importance of granting citizenship to so-called “Dreamers,” or people who would be eligible to benefit from the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act)—legislation intended to protect almost anyone who entered the U.S. illegally when they were under the age of 16.[131]  Whereas the DREAM Act aims to use the legislative process to help all people fitting that description gain permanent legal status as well as placement upon a path-to-citizenship, DACA beneficiaries are required to renew their applications for protection from deportation every two years.[132]

During an October 2020 presidential debate with Donald Trump, Biden said: “Within 100 days [of taking over the presidency], I’m going to send to the United States Congress a [proposed bill for] pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. And all of those so-called Dreamers, those DACA kids, they’re going to be immediately certified to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship. We owe them, we owe them.”[133]

True to his word, Biden, on January 20, 2021—his first day in office as U.S. President—sent to Congress a comprehensive immigration bill—the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021—proposing to create a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States.[134] That same day, Biden also issued a memorandum “to preserve and fortify DACA.”[135]

All of these actions make obvious political sense for Biden and the Democrats, who view the illegal population in the United States as a potentially enormous source of new Democratic voters. Nearly three-quarters of all illegal aliens who now reside in the U.S. hail from Mexico, Central America, and South America[136]—and 62 percent of current potential U.S. voters from those same countries identify with, or lean toward, the Democratic Party, vs. just 34 percent who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.[137] A Pew Research survey, meanwhile, suggests that Latino illegal aliens who, by definition, are not yet eligible to vote in the United States at the present time, are nearly 8 times more likely to identify ideologically with the Democratic Party rather than with the Republican Party.[138] If those people eventually acquire citizenship and the right to vote, the implications for the future of American politics are self-evident.

Such a turn of events would represent a major triumph for The Cloward-Piven Strategy, whereby the American electoral system would be suddenly inundated with millions of new voters who, along with their descendants in generations to come, would forever change the nature of the U.S. voting population.

Ending Construction of the Border Wall

In its official 2020 Platform, the Democratic Party, committed to facilitating an influx of illegal newcomers to America by every means practicable, condemned the construction of “an unnecessary, wasteful, and ineffective wall on the southern border.”[139] Presidential candidate Joe Biden likewise stated in March 2020: “We don’t need a wall.” “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my Administration,” he told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro during an August 2020 interview.[140]

Biden followed through on his promise when, on his first day as president, he issued a formal proclamation which stated that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border [between the U.S. and Mexico] is not a serious policy solution,” but rather, “is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.” “It shall be the policy of my Administration,” he added, “that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”[141]

Nearly 5 months later, on June 11, 2021, the Biden White House called on Congress to cancel more than $2 billion in spending that originally had been earmarked for former President Trump’s border wall.[142]

Changing America’s Asylum Policy 

Biden and the Democrats aim to restore the “catch-and-release” system of the pre-Trump era, whereby millions of asylum seekers who crossed the southern U.S. border illegally, were released into the American interior—never again to be seen by U.S. immigration authorities, in most cases. As the 2020 Democratic Party Platform said: “Democrats will end Trump Administration policies that deny protected entry to asylum seekers…. And we will end prosecution of asylum seekers at the border and policies that force them to apply from ‘safe third countries,’ which are far from safe.”[143]

On February 2, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order designed to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and to “restore and strengthen our own asylum system, which has been badly damaged by policies enacted over the last 4 years that contravened our values and caused needless human suffering.”[144]

On February 3, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reported that the Biden Administration had already begun restoring “catch-and-release” as official U.S. policy:

Hundreds of Haitian migrants who are crossing the Rio Grande border in the normally staid Del Rio sector of Texas are enjoying the first return to “catch-and-release” policies since President Donald Trump’s administration all but eliminated them. U.S. Border Patrol and ICE are allowing hundreds of Haitians and other migrant nationalities who cross in the Del Rio region to avoid detention or quick return to Mexico; instead they are given Notices to Appear in immigration court at some point in the future and allowed to board Greyhound buses for other parts of the United States, according to federal sources and the head of a migrant-assistance agency helping the migrants….

[O]ne Border Patrol agent in the area told CIS that the migrants are now too numerous for local systems to process, just like the catch-and-release circumstances that powered the 2019 crisis: “We are releasing hundreds from many different countries of origin because we simply don’t have enough room to hold them all,” the Border Patrol agent told the Center for Immigration Studies. “They are being released under what is called an O.R., which means ‘Own Recognizance’ – basically, a promise to arrive for their immigration hearing at some future date. We can’t hold them because they are crossing all day long in groups of 20 to 40, men, women, children.”[145]

On February 6, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Biden Administration had canceled the Trump-era agreements by which the former president had negotiated with Central American governments to place clear and reasonable limits on access to the U.S. asylum system.[146]

On February 12, the Biden Administration stated that asylum seekers who, under President Trump’s 2019 “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), had been forced to remain in Mexico while waiting for their cases to be resolved in the United States, would now be readily admitted into the U.S. without further delay.[147]

In March 2021, President Biden said that “I make no apology” for ending MPP, a policy he claimed was forcing migrants to the “edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat.”

By March 2021 as well, Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley were routinely releasing asylum-seeking migrants into the American interior without even bothering to go through the process of giving them a “Notice To Appear” (NTA) for an asylum court hearing at some future date. Instead, the migrants were hurriedly registered into a digital system and told that they themselves would be responsible to schedule their own asylum hearings sometime thereafter. As a Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) source told Fox News, the migrant crisis had “become so dire that BP [Border Patrol] has no choice but to release people nearly immediately after apprehension because there is no space to hold people even to do necessary NTA paperwork.”[148] Said another CBP official with knowledge of the Biden plan: “This is insane, it is another pull factor that will overwhelm us. We are creating another entirely different class of aliens we will have to deal with years from now. We will never find most of these aliens once they are released.”[149]

In accord with President Biden’s wishes, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols with a June 1, 2021 memorandum — even though approximately 90 percent of asylum cases were generally found, by American courts, to be without merit.

Moreover, it was well established that the vast majority of the people released via MPP failed to subsequently show up for their court hearings. In June 2019, for instance, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan had told a Senate panel that according to a recently conducted study of 7,000 family units that had illegally crossed America’s southern border before being released under MPP provisions: “It depends on demographic, the court, but we see too many cases where people are not showing up. Out of those 7,000 cases, 90 [percent] received final orders of removal in absentia, 90 percent.”

What America was witnessing, quite simply, was The Cloward-Piven Strategy—designed to further inundate the nation with countless millions of newcomers by means of a chaotic, unregulated asylum process—clearly on display for all to see.

Increasing Immigration from Muslim Countries

Virtually every American has heard about Donald Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban” of 2017. When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he characterized Trump’s “ban” as a “morally wrong” manifestation of “anti-Muslim bias” that constituted “a betrayal of all our foundations of American history and American freedom, religious freedom.”[150]

The term “Muslim ban,” as employed by Biden and fellow Democrats, refers to the fact that President Trump, professing a desire “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,”[151] issued a 2017 executive order calling for a temporary suspension of almost all travel and refugee admissions to the U.S. from seven nations that were hotbeds of Islamic terrorism and/or civil war: Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria. The order also mandated the implementation of an “extreme vetting” process for any and all immigrants and visitors to the U.S.

And how did President Trump select the seven aforementioned Muslim-majority countries as targets for his executive action? Actually, as noted earlier in this text, he chose precisely the same seven countries that had been named in the Visa Waiver Program Improvement & Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, which had passed easily through Congress before being signed into law by President Obama in December 2015.[152]

The Democratic Party Platform of 2020 vowed to “immediately terminate the Trump Administration’s discriminatory travel and immigration bans that disproportionately impact Muslim, Arab, and African people, and invite those whose visas have been denied under these xenophobic and un-American policies to re-apply to come to the United States.”[153] Meanwhile, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said: “Make no mistake, this anti-Muslim bias is not only morally wrong, it’s like putting up a great big recruiting banner for terrorists…. A ban is a betrayal of all our foundations of American history and American freedom, religious freedom, the first freedom.”[154] “On day one [as U.S. President],” he added, “I’ll end Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban.”[155]

Biden kept this promise as well. In a January 20, 2021 presidential proclamation, he revoked Trump’s aforementioned executive order.[156] His motives for doing this are obvious: Muslims vote heavily Democrat, as reflected by a 2017 Pew Research Center study showing that 66% of Muslims identify with or lean towards the Democratic Party, vs. just 13% who identify with or lean towards the Republican Party.

Welcoming Immigrants Dependent on Public Welfare Programs

Democrats condemned the Trump Administration’s 2019 pledge to make it more difficult for people who were a “public charge”—i.e., dependent on government benefits—to apply for U.S. citizenship.[157] As the Center for Immigration Studies explains: “The [Trump] rule was supposed to go into effect on October 15, 2019, but was delayed until February 21, 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out lower-court injunctions that had blocked implementation. Then a judge in the Northern District of Illinois issued an order on November 2, 2020, vacating the rule nationwide. The next day, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, which, pending appeal, allowed for the continued application of Trump’s public charge rule.[158]

This was unacceptable to Biden and the Democrats. The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force of 2020—created for the purpose of bridging the divide between the policy positions of the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders—vowed to “immediately halt enforcement of and rescind the Trump [A]dministration’s new public charge regulations, which have racial underpinnings and undermine critical access to public benefits and resources.”[159]

On March 9, 2021, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the Biden Administration would no longer enforce Trump’s 2019 public charge rule—on grounds that it “was not in keeping with our nation’s values.”[160]

Biden Rolls Back COVID Protections at the Border

In early February 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s principal public-health agency, was busy “expanding the requirement for a negative COVID-19 test to all air passengers entering the United States,” while also demanding that masks be worn at all times even by travelers who tested negative for COVID.[161] President Biden, meanwhile, was repeatedly reminding Americans that it was their “patriotic duty” to wear masks and practice “social distancing” in an effort to slow the spread of the pandemic.[162]

But also at that very same time, the Biden Administration was actively releasing into American neighborhoods thousands of illegal foreign nationals—including many from countries with high rates of COVID infection—without ever testing them for evidence that they may have been carrying the deadly coronavirus. “We do not test the illegal aliens we release,” said National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd. “So, we’re releasing people without knowing, which obviously puts the public at risk.” In a similar vein, Sheriff Leon Wilmot of Yuma County, Arizona characterized the Biden policy as “a particularly dangerous approach,” adding: “[T]here is currently no protocol for testing any of these people for the COVID-19 virus. Nor is there any support being offered by the federal government to house, feed, medically treat or transport these immigrants.”[163]

In a presidential proclamation issued on February 24, Joe Biden announced that he was suspending three Trump-era proclamations that, for reasons of public health, had restricted immigration to the U.S. during the COVID pandemic of 2020.[164] Three weeks after Biden’s announcement, congressional Democrats remained silent when the National Sheriffs Association reported that as many as half of all people illegally crossing the southern U.S. border were possibly infected with COVID-19.[165]

Another key Biden decision involved “Title 42,” a provision of the 1944 Public Health and Safety Act authorizing the Border Patrol to quickly expel any migrant because of “health and safety” concerns.[166] The Trump Administration had begun utilizing Title 42 in March of 2020 as a means of preventing foreigners from bringing additional cases of COVID-19 into the U.S.[167]  All told, the policy kept approximately 650,000 potential border-crossers out of the United States during the pandemic.[168] But in May 2021, the Biden Administration decided to grant a broad exemption from Title 42 restrictions. As the Washington Free Beacon reported:

“A May memo … authored by senior staff at [Customs and Border Protection], emphasizes the ability of ‘customs officers [to] determine [who] should be allowed into the United States.’ [CBP] officials say the Biden [A]dministration is looking to liberally interpret that provision, which was initially meant for migrants with extenuating circumstances related to humanitarian concerns or political repression. Broadening the humanitarian exemption would constitute a de facto reversal of the Trump [A]dministration’s guidance on limiting migration into the country.”[169]

This policy change was enacted by Biden despite the fact that the CDC still rated Mexico as a “Level 4” country vis-a-vis its COVID-19 infection numbers, the highest danger level on the CDC’s scale. Indeed, the CDC at that time was warning that Americans “should avoid all travel to Mexico.”[170] But such facts are irrelevant to a political party whose primary concern is to increase its own power by any means necessary. If the acquisition of such power can be facilitated by the act of permitting countless numbers of potentially ill newcomers to enter the U.S. and run the risk of further spreading a highly contagious and deadly disease, so be it. In the Democratic Party’s calculus, that is a price well worth paying.

While the Biden Administration applied Title 42 restrictions to single adults and many migrant families, it did not apply it to migrant children arriving alone at the southern border. This was a departure from the policy of the Trump administration.

On June 23, 2021, Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas reported that one border official had recently informed him that the Biden Administration was planning to completely phase out the use of Title 42 by mid-July.[171]

On July 26, 2021 — when President Biden’s public approval ratings were sinking as a result of the chaos on the border amid a recent surge in the highly transmissible “delta variant” of the coronavirus — the Administration announced that it would temporarily keep Title 42 in place to some extent. “It will remain in place as long as that is the guidance from our health and medical experts,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

On August 2, 2021, the Biden administration — again reacting to widening public fears about the coronavirus variant that was surging across the U.S. — said it would keep Title 42 in effect for the foreseeable future.

The Prevalence of COVID-19 Among Illegal Migrants

According to an August 2021 report by NBC News: “Migrants are not tested for COVID in Border Patrol custody unless they show symptoms, but all are tested when they leave Border Patrol custody…. Immigrants who are allowed to stay in the U.S. to claim asylum are given tests when they are transferred to ICE, Health and Human Services, or non-governmental organizations. Deportees who are scheduled to be put on planes out of the U.S. are tested for COVID and other infectious diseases by ICE…. If a migrant who is about to be deported by ICE tests positive for COVID, the migrant is quarantined and deportation is delayed.”

In March 2021, nearly 10% of girls at a temporary shelter for migrant teenagers in San Diego tested positive for COVID-19. Meanwhile, 14% of migrant children at a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, likewise tested positive.

In May 2021, Health and Human Services (HHS) reported that more than 3,000 coronavirus cases had been identified among migrant children in Texas since 2020.

During the first two weeks of July 2021, the number of detainees who tested positive for the disease in the Rio Grande Valley — one of the major destinations for migrants crossing the southern U.S. border illegally — increased by 900% above the levels of confirmed positive cases that had been identified during the previous 14 months.

During a two-to-three-week period in late July and early August, more than 18% of migrant families and 20% of unaccompanied minors who had recently crossed the U.S. border, tested positive for COVID upon leaving the custody of the Border Patrol.

On August 4, 2021, The Texas border city of McAllen reported that since mid-February, Customs & Border Protection (CBP) had released into that town more than 7,000 illegal migrants who were confirmed COVID-19 positive. That figure included over 1,500 during the preceding seven days alone. According to Fox News: “Immigrants released by CBP are dropped off with Catholic Charities and tested for COVID by a third party. If they test positive, they are asked to quarantine and [are] offered a room at a quarantine site.”

On August 7, 2021, NBC News reported that on some planes that were loaded with migrants scheduled for deportation, more than 25% of the passengers tested positive before departure, causing ICE to remove those individuals from the flights for quarantine in the United States.

On September 10, 2021, Fox News reported that “more than 18% of migrant families who recently crossed the border tested positive for COVID before being released by Border Patrol,” while “another 20% of unaccompanied minors tested positive for the virus.”

Increasing the Admission of Refugees into the U.S.

Democrats seek to sabotage America’s ability to absorb foreign-born newcomers not only by creating conditions that will promote the entry of illegal migrants and asylees, but also by using the refugee system to import massive numbers of people who are likely to eventually align themselves with the Democratic Party’s political agendas.[172] Toward that end, the Party’s official 2020 Platform pledged to “significantly raise the annual global refugee admissions target, and [to] work with Congress to create a minimum annual number for refugee admissions.”[173]

In fulfillment of that pledge, President Biden on February 4, 2021 signed an executive order revoking a Trump executive order that had called for the enhanced vetting of aspiring refugees and other newcomers to America.[174] In May 2021, Biden issued a presidential memorandum raising the cap on refugee admissions to the U.S. from 12,000 in 2020,[175] to 62,500 in 2021, and to 125,000 in 2022—i.e., a tenfold increase within the space of just two years. The 2022 projection also far exceeded the 2016 and 2017 refugee totals under the Obama Administration—85,000 and 54,000, respectively.[176]

Conservative author Michelle Malkin spelled out some key considerations vis-a-vis the refugees who would be coming to America as a result of the new Biden policy:

“According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the average estimated refugee’s lifetime fiscal cost, expressed as a net present value, is $60,000, with those entering as adults (ages 25 to 64) costing $133,000 each. Only one-third of those adult refugees have completed more than a sixth-grade education before landing in the U.S. They are granted immediate access to government welfare programs including Medicaid, housing, food stamps and cash assistance…. [M]any of [them …] relocate to ethnic enclaves to join friends and family where they take low-wage, low-skilled jobs in manufacturing, meatpacking, retail, and the trades — exactly the kind of jobs the Beltway politicians promise they are creating for Americans first.”[177]

Center for Immigration Studies research director Steven Camarota, meanwhile, calculated that for “what it costs to resettle one Middle Eastern refugee in the United States for five years, about 12 refugees can be helped in the Middle East for five years, or 61 refugees can be helped for one year.”[178]

But refugees who are safely and successfully resettled in the Middle East do nothing to enhance the political fortunes of the Democrats. Thus, the Democrats are not interested in such a solution. Their only concern is that an overwhelming majority of refugees from the aforementioned regions of the world should one day become reliable Democrat voters in the United States, which a large percentage of their predecessors from those same places have thus far proven themselves to be.[179]

On August 30, 2021, Breitbart.com reported:

“President Joe Biden’s federal agencies, with the help of refugee contractors, plan to resettle Afghans across a multitude of swing states…. [T]housands of Afghans are being flown to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, where they are then dispersed throughout the United States. Many thousands are heading to swing states. Just this past week, 11 flights of Afghans were taken to Wisconsin while hundreds of others are being resettled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More are going to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition, Afghans are being resettled throughout West Texas, areas of Arizona, the suburbs of Virginia, as well as Akron, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Florida, while refugee contractors in North Carolina hope to resettle Afghans in the state. While the Biden administration has been unclear about the total number of Afghans it is seeking to resettle across the U.S., refugee contractors are expecting tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands when the operation is completed.

“Afghans with Special Immigrant Visa (SIVs), a minority of the Afghans arriving, have green cards and can apply for naturalized American citizenship after living in the U.S. for five years. Afghans arriving on refugee status can apply for a green card after living in the U.S. for a year. After obtaining their green card, they can then apply for naturalized American citizenship after five years of living in the U.S. For the tens of thousands of Afghans that the Biden administration is giving humanitarian parole to come to the U.S., they must adjust status to secure green cards after two years. Later, they too could eventually get naturalized American citizenship.”

On December 31, 2021, Breitbart.com reported:

“President Joe Biden has resettled more than 52,000 Afghans across American cities, towns, and communities this year, the latest Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data reveals, in the largest refugee resettlement operation in American history. Biden’s massive Afghan resettlement operation started in mid-August after a botched withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan following a 20-year war that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Since then, Biden has resettled more than 52,000 Afghans across American communities in 46 states. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has admitted that vetting procedures for Afghans arriving in the U.S. are minimal. ‘We are not conducting in-person, refugee interviews of 100 percent individuals,’ Mayorkas said during a congressional hearing in November. […]

“Along with those resettled across American communities, the Biden administration continues temporarily housing about 22,500 Afghans at U.S. military bases that they have transformed into refugee camps. Those bases include Camp Atterbury in Indiana; Fort Dix in New Jersey; Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Fort Pickett in Virginia; and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. Afghans, while still living on the bases, can begin applying for work permits.

“In total, the Biden administration has brought more than 75,000 Afghans to the U.S. in just a matter of a little more than four months. Most are arriving on humanitarian parole, a visa-less category for anyone claiming to be facing persecution, while few are Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders. […]

“Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to research, and each refugee costs taxpayers about $133,000 over the course of their lifetime. Within five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.”

Using the U.S. Military to Help Resettle Illegals into Various U.S. States without the Consent of Those States

On July 14, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson issued a blockbuster report in which he stated:

“This show has confirmed that the Biden administration has enlisted the U.S. military to move illegal immigrants secretly around our country. That is happening at Laughlin Air Force base in Texas. We know it’s happening there because a man called Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Burrows sent his subordinates an e-mail spelling it out very clearly, quote: ‘Over the next few days, weeks, or months,’ the note began, ‘… you may see passenger aircraft on our ramp transporting undocumented non-citizens. Please review the attached Public Affairs guidance on the issue.’ Burrows’ e-mail then instructed uniformed military personnel to hide what was happening on the base from the country they are sworn to serve. Quote: ‘Do not take photographs and refrain from posting anything on social media.’ […]

“Now, we got his e-mail from a whistleblower and at first, we doubted it could be real. During the last administration, you’ll remember, The Pentagon firmly refused to protect America’s southern border. ‘That’s not our job,’ they said. ‘It’s too political. Send us to Syria.’ And yet, according to this document, here was the very same U.S. military leadership at The Pentagon helping the Biden administration with maximum enforced stealth, with secrecy to subvert this country’s core immigration laws. It was hard to believe that could be happening, but it is happening. The Pentagon has confirmed it to us.

“Spokesman Chris Mitchell described the flights from Laughlin as noncitizen movement, part of what he called the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s mission. He told us then to direct any further questions to I.C.E., so we did. We called I.C.E. multiple times. I.C.E. did not deny they were using Laughlin Air Force base to relocate large numbers of foreign nationals into the interior of our country and do it secretly.”

Carlson’s report then showed a video segment of Center for Immigration Studies senior national fellow Todd Bensman providing details about the places to which the illegals were being transported. Said Bensman: “What’s happening most of the time is that they are boarding buses and heading into America’s heartland. A conveyor belt of commercial and charter buses just like this one in Del Rio, Texas are carrying tens of thousands, sight unseen, from Texas, Arizona, and California borderlands northward, and they are dropping their Haitian, Venezuelan, Cuban, and Central American family units in Florida and New Jersey, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and to large cities in Texas such as Dallas and Houston.”

Carlson then noted the obvious: that the Biden Administration was secretly using the U.S. military to assist in the task of “changing the electoral map” of the United States and enacting “demographic transformation in our country, without our consent, and in violation of our laws.”

The segment concluded with former Trump White House advisor Stephen Miller telling Carlson: “[W]hat I want to get across to your audience to really advance this story is to understand that what is happening now is unprecedented, and the whole conversation about border security up to this point in time has been wrong. This is not about an administration that is unable to protect the border. This is about an administration that in a very purposeful, planned, deliberate, painstaking fashion has turned our Border Patrol and I.C.E. agencies into resettlement agencies. That is the word that everyone needs to know and repeat. This is a planned resettlement. The largest of its kind, I would suggest perhaps in the history of the world in terms of the number of illegal border crossers being resettled into the interior of our country in violation of plain law.”

  • Dozens of Secret Flights Carrying Illegals to Florida and New York

In early November 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis reported that over the course of the summer, more than 70 flights had transported groups of migrants from America’s southern border to Jacksonville, Florida in the dark of night. “Over 70 air charter flights [on] jetliner airliners coming from the southwest border have landed at Jacksonville International Airport,” said Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s public safety czar. “On average, there’s 36 passengers on each of these flights,” added Keefe. “And that has been going on over the course of the summer through September. […] We’re in a sad situation of trying to run an investigation. Who is facilitating this travel? How are they getting here? Who are the support people? Who are the sponsors?” “We don’t know definitively or specifically as to why Jacksonville is the chosen place,” Keefe continued. “[We’re] having to watch and observe — in effect, spy on the government to see what it is that they’re doing in the middle of the night out of these airport facilities.”

In October, the New York Post had reported that similar flights had been arriving at the airport in Westchester, New York, throughout the summer.

Biden Administration Sues Texas & Governor Greg Abbott Over Executive Order Restricting The Transportation Of Migrants

On July 30, 2021, the Biden administration’s DOJ filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, as a challenge to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order that — in an effort to prevent any further spread of the coronavirus pandemic — restricted the ground transportation (via buses and trains) of illegal migrants, most of whom were unvaccinated, to various locations across the state.  The Biden lawsuit argued that:  “The executive order violates the Supremacy Clause and causes injury to the United States and to individuals whom the United States is charged to protect, jeopardizing the health and safety of noncitizens in federal custody, risking the safety of federal law enforcement personnel and their families, and exacerbating the spread of COVID-19 in our communities.” Further, the suit claimed that the governor’s order obstructed Congress from performing its duty to craft and enforce immigration laws. The lawsuit also warned: “If CBP (Customs and Border Protection) is unable to transfer noncitizens out of CBP facilities, CBP detention numbers and the average time individuals are in custody will rise, conditions will deteriorate, and there will be a greater risk of COVID-19 transmission to noncitizens and staff.”

Greatly Increasing Legal Immigration

Joe Biden has no concern about whether or not the multitudinous newcomers to the U.S. will be able to effectively assimilate into American society and an American value system, before additional waves of newcomers are likewise hurriedly imported and naturalized. Indeed, in a 2019 speech to the Asian and Latino Coalition PAC, Biden promised to triple the roughly 1.2 million immigrants who were being admitted to the U.S. every year, saying, without evidence: “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people.”[180]

In May 2021, The New York Times obtained a 46-page draft blueprint of the Biden Administration’s plan to make it easier for many categories of people—including foreign workers, trafficking victims, refugees, asylum seekers, farmworkers, and American Indians born in Canada—to immigrate legally to the United States.[181]

On July 2, 2021, the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services announced that the Biden Administration, in fulfillment of a February 2 executive order by which President Biden had established a Naturalization Working Group (NWG), was formally launching a new federal initiative to help millions of immigrants living in the United States to become citizens. Specifically, the NWG would recruit people at various stages of the immigration process—from newcomers to lawful permanent residents—and target them with what Biden called “welcoming strategies that promote integration, inclusion, and citizenship.” The objective, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, was to “promot[e] naturalization to all who are eligible.”[182]

At its essence, this Biden plan represents yet another expression of The Cloward-Piven Strategy by which the Democratic Party aims to transform America by inundating the nation with a maximum number of additional future Democrats.

Ending Nearly All Deportations

To augment the effects of the importation of millions of new potential Democrat voters, the left seeks also to prevent the expulsion of potential Democrats who are already living in the United States. In a Democratic primary debate in March 2020, for instance, candidate Joe Biden vowed that during his presidential Administration’s first 100 days, “no one, no one will be deported at all.” “From that point on,” he added, “the only deportations that will take place are [for] commissions of felonies in the United States of America.”[183]

On another occasion during his 2020 campaign, Biden said that immigration agents should “only arrest for the purpose of dealing with a felony that’s committed [in the United States], and I don’t count drunk driving as a felony”[184]—even though the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency reported 49,106 criminal convictions for driving-under-the-influence in fiscal year 2019 alone.[185]

And when a reporter asked candidate Biden if “undocumented immigrants, arrested by local police, [should] be turned over to immigration officials,” he replied: “No. Look, we are a nation of immigrants. Our future rests upon the Latino community being fully integrated…. Xenophobia is a disease.”[186]

On his first day as president in January 2021, Biden proudly demonstrated his resolve in opposing deportations by issuing an executive order that revoked a 2017 order by which former President Trump had prioritized the removal of illegal aliens who had “committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense,” or who had “abused any program related to receipt of public benefits” (e.g., welfare and food stamps).[187]

In accordance with President Biden’s clearly articulated intention to suspend virtually all deportations of illegal aliens, an internal ICE memo dated January 21, 2021 explicitly instructed ICE agents to immediately “stop all removals.” The memo also informed those agents that in “all cases”—even where the detainees had no one in the U.S. who could serve as their sponsor—the agents should assume that there would be “no significant likelihood of removal in [the] foreseeable future” and thus should “[r]elease them all, immediately.”[188]

Regarding a Texas federal judge’s January 26, 2021 ruling against the Biden Administration’s 100-day moratorium on deportations,[189] former ICE Acting Director Tom Homan complained on February 10th that the Administration was defiantly “circumventing the judge’s order” by instructing ICE officers to stop arresting illegals, and by releasing those illegals into local communities. “What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world?” Homan asked. “If you come to the country illegally, if you can get past the border patrol, don’t commit an aggravated felony, and you’re home free. You get to stay because ICE is not looking for you. It’s no longer illegal to be here illegally.” Describing the Biden policy as “the most anti-law enforcement, pro-criminal policy that I could ever imagine in my worst nightmare,” Homan asserted that the new president “is sending a message to the rest of the world” and, as a result, “the border is surging.” “Be clear what’s happening here,” Homan added. “President Biden has declared the entire country a sanctuary jurisdiction, which means more tragedy is going to come. Mark my words. People will die. People will be raped. People will be victimized by criminals that shouldn’t even be here.”[190]

In February 2021, the Biden Administration cancelled Operation Talon, a Trump-era initiative designed to deport convicted sex offenders residing illegally in the United States.[191] Biden’s action was a very big deal, in light of the fact that between October 2014 and May 2018, ICE had arrested at least 19,572 illegal aliens who had previously been convicted of sex-related offenses.[192]

On March 4, 2021, ICE told Congress that it would soon open an “ICE Case Review” process allowing illegal aliens to challenge their arrest, detainment, or scheduled deportation if they believed that their cases did not meet the Biden Administration’s new standard, which only authorized such penalties for convicted aggravated felons, terrorists, gang members, or national security threats.[193]

In early May of 2021, the Biden Administration reversed a proposed rule change by former President Trump that, if enacted, would have prevented the federal government from continuing to issue work permits to illegal aliens who had received final deportation orders from federal immigration judges.[194] In its announcement, the Biden team claimed that Trump’s proposal “would impose exorbitant costs and burdens on U.S. employers related to labor turnover.”[195]

The very obvious bottom line is this: President Biden doesn’t care how many violent criminals or sex offenders are able to enter and remain in the United States as a result of his immigration and deportation policies. Nor does he care how many innocent lives such criminals may ruin once they are here. In the tyrannical tradition of Cloward-Piven, Biden and his fellow Democrats are consumed with but a single overriding obsession: that a maximum number of loyal future Democrats will find their way into the country and eventually gain citizenship and the right to vote.[196]

Ending Immigration Raids

To further augment its effort to maximize the number of illegal aliens who are permitted to stay in the U.S. and eventually become Democrat voters, the Democratic Party pledged, in its official 2020 Platform, to “end workplace and community raids” designed to snare illegal aliens, particularly at “sensitive locations like our schools, houses of worship, health care facilities, benefits offices, and DMVs.”[197] Joe Biden repeatedly and unambiguously echoed this position during his presidential campaign.[198] And during his time in office thus far, Biden, true to his word, has not authorized even a single major workplace raid anywhere in the United States.[199]

Ending the Expulsion of Children Who Come to America Illegally — So Long As They Are Not Cuban

On March 19, 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CBS This Morning about a forthcoming Biden Administration program that would allow parents lawfully residing in the U.S. to request refugee status for their children in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Mayorkas noted that despite the enactment of this program—which was originally an Obama initiative that President Trump subsequently discontinued—some minors might attempt to enter the United States illegally. “We well understand that out of desperation, some children might not wait,” said Mayorkas. “Some loving parents might send their child to traverse Mexico alone to reach the southern border—our southern border. I hope they don’t undertake that perilous journey. But if they do, we will not expel that young child. We will care for that young child and unite that child with a responsible parent. That is who we are as a nation and we can do it.”[200]

In other words, Mayorkas was pledging that minors would be permitted to illegally breach America’s southern border with impunity, even as he admitted that the U.S. government was “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.”[201] Indeed, occupancy at migrant “surge facilities” along the border had reached as much as 729 percent capacity, a situation that required children in detention to take turns sleeping on floors and to limit themselves to only one shower per week.[202] And as The Washington Post reported, the Biden Administration “was holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells for far longer than legally allowed.”[203]

Notably, Mayorkas’ message to Central Americans was a stark contrast to what he would say just two months later during a July 13, 2021 press conference at the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, when he announced that the Biden Administration was taking a hard line against Cubans who might attempt to come to the United States seeking asylum. “The time is never right to attempt migration by sea, he said. “To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking. Allow me to be clear: If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.” Why the drastic change of tone by Mayorkas? Because Cubans in the U.S. have a history of supporting Republicans politically, whereas people from Mexico and Central America have traditionally been heavy supporters of Democrats.

Support for Sanctuary Cities

As noted earlier in this text, Democrats in 2017 condemned a Trump executive order that called for the denial of federal grants to the nearly 500 sanctuary cities that refused to alert federal authorities to the presence of illegal aliens in those locales.[204] The Democrats portrayed Trump’s order as a “shameful” and “divisive” measure that would “betray our nation’s values.”[205] During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden likewise made clear his belief that sanctuary cities should be fully eligible for federal funding.[206] Consistent with that position, Biden overturned the Trump executive order shortly after taking his oath of office in January 2021.[207]

On March 4, 2021, the Biden Department of Justice (DoJ) asked the Supreme Court to dismiss three pending cert petitions (requests to hear a case) regarding the Trump Administration’s effort to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. The following day, the Court agreed to dismiss the petitions.[208]

Six weeks later, on April 14, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the DoJ to begin implementing the change. Two weeks after that, Reuters reported: “The U.S. Justice Department has repealed a policy put in place during Donald Trump’s presidency that cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.”[209]

The Massive Surge of Illegal Border Crossers

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden was quite honest with the American people regarding his firm resolve to open the floodgates to newcomers at America’s southern border. In a September 2019 Democratic presidential debate, for instance, he clearly stated: “What I would do as president is several more things, because things have changed. I would, in fact, make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the borderall those people are seeking asylum, they deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation who says, if you want to flee, and you’re freeing oppression, you should come.”[210]

And Biden most certainly got what he was calling for. In January 2021, the CBP took into custody 78,442 migrants who had crossed America’s southern border illegally. That figure then climbed to 100,441 in February, and 173,337 in March[211]—aside from an additional 30,000 people per month who evaded capture and snuck into the United States undetected. As the Center for Immigration Studies reported in March 2021: “[M]igrants in Central America and Mexico were motivated by the prospect that a Democrat would win the U.S. presidency and open the border. [The border] surge began to materialize after the November election, with some even rushing the border chanting “Biden, Biden, Biden,” and has gathered strength each month since.”[212]

Of the many thousands of illegal migrants who were apprehended by Border Patrol personnel, an enormous number were simply released into the American interior, particularly if they were part of a group claiming to be a “family unit.” As The Epoch Times reported on March 29, 2021: “Now the vast majority (upwards of 85 percent) of family units who are apprehended by Border Patrol after crossing the border illegally are quickly released into the United States…. The families being released are either given a notice to appear containing a court date to begin their immigration proceedings, or given nothing and released [on] their own recognizance.”[213]

That same month, TheBlaze.com reported that “unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants are surging into the country in anticipation of more lenient treatment under President Biden.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, described the situation as a “crisis” where “the new [A]dministration was holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children” in steel-and-concrete cells for “far longer than legally allowed, while federal health officials scrambled to place them with relatives or sponsors who had been vetted. Notably, the number of young people being held in these migrant facilities was more than four times greater than the largest corresponding number from the Trump era.[214]

On March 23, 2021, The Epoch Times provided details regarding the abominable conditions in which the migrants were being detained:

“The family-unit holding cells smell like urine and vomit. Fights break out in the unaccompanied-minor cells. Scabies, lice, the flu, and COVID-19 run rampant. Up to 80 individuals are squeezed into each 24- by 30-foot cell, and there aren’t enough mattresses for everyone. Sheets of plastic divide the rooms…. One or two agents are left to control 300 to 500 people during a shift. No agent wants to report physical or sexual assaults between the aliens because they’ll get blamed for ‘letting it happen.’ […] The number of unaccompanied minors—children under 18 who arrive without a parent—is buckling the system.”[215]

But the Democrats and the mainstream media, who had bellowed relentlessly regarding the alleged atrocities committed in such facilities under Trump, were now mostly silent.[216]

One Border Patrol agent, who went by the pseudonym “Carlos” in order to protect his privacy, further fleshed out the picture of life in a Biden Administration surge facility along the border:

  • “Any diseases that are in there, it’s being kept in there, like a petri dish. The smell is overwhelming.”
  • “We’re getting them [unaccompanied minors mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador] out of here as quickly as possible, but we are so overwhelmed right now.”
  • “Everybody that shows up here—even if it’s a 3-year-old kid with no one around—they all have an address on them. And they’ll give it to you: ‘Here’s my address; this is where you are sending me.’ And that’s what we do. This is the way we are being played.”
  • “We’re dealing with a different culture who’s not afraid to send all their kids under the age of five, knowing they’re going to get raped [during their voyage], knowing they’re going to get killed. You talk to the adults or the teenagers and they’ll tell you, ‘They raped three or four girls, and they kicked them off the trains.’ They’re going to die.”
  • “There’s no repercussions. I’m not even going to give you a court date. You don’t even have to show up at court if you don’t want to. It’d be nice, but you don’t have to. That word gets out immediately. And I mean overnight.”[217]

Explaining that it was common knowledge among the migrants that anyone bringing a child with them would be quickly released and transported, at taxpayer expense, to various locations across the United States, Carlos said: “They’ll put them in a hotel for a couple of days until their flight is ready to fly them to where they are going. That’s tax dollars.”[218]

Carlos further emphasized that the migrant surge was a direct result of President Biden’s rollback of the Trump Administration’s border policies: “One hundred and ten percent. They were already ready before Biden was even in office. They knew that the doors were going to be open. And now we’ve got a point where we cannot stop it.”[219]

Because of this, lamented Carlos, morale among Border Patrol agents had reached an all-time low: “The attrition rate right now is ridiculous. We don’t want to work for the Border Patrol anymore. It’s not the Border Patrol…. [E]verything was working just fine [under Trump]. Now we’ve got this trash.”[220]

It should be noted that many of the migrants who are flooding illegally into the United States have suffered enormous indignity and pain while making their northward trek. According to Doctors Without Borders, two-thirds of them report, when surveyed, that they experienced some sort of violence during the journey, including abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape. Nearly one-third of female migrants say they were sexually abused along the way, usually by means of rape.[221]

The people benefiting most from the flood of illegal migrants to America are the Mexico-based criminal drug cartels, which have raked in countless millions of dollars in exchange for their assistance in smuggling people into the United States. As Arizona Sheriff Mark Dannels, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, explained in March 2021: “[The migrants are] paying $6,000 to come into our country, [they’re] taken to communities throughout the U.S. and then exploited by the cartels with drugs, gangs and sex trafficking. This is what the mainstream media’s not putting out there right now. The cartels are smiling thanks to this [A]dministration, and the revision on … orders from [the] previous president, Trump.”[222]

In April of 2021, the number of border apprehensions of illegal migrants reached a new high of 178,854, which was promptly exceeded by the 180,034 apprehensions made in May.[223] The latter figure represented a staggering 674 percent increase over May of 2020, when 23,237 illegal aliens had been apprehended.[224] Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, stated that “this surge is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.”[225] The New York Post reported in June 2021: “The 2021 figures are up 25 percent to 35 percent from pre-pandemic 2019. Indeed, the total for this year is on pace to be higher than we have seen in 20 years.”[226]

In June 2021, border officials arrested a new record-high of approximately 188,829 illegal migrants. This figure was particularly remarkable in light of the fact that border arrests in the past had typically decreased during the brutally hot summers. For example, previous detention totals for the month of June were 33,049 in 2020, 104,311 in 2019, and 43,189 in 2018. Equally noteworthy is the fact that the June 2021 figure consisted of an enormous number of people with a high likelihood of being released on their own recognizance: (a) 15,253 unaccompanied children, an 8% increase over the May total of 14,137, and (b) 55,805 family units, a 25% spike above the May total of 44,746. In other words, the migrants well understood that children — either alone or in groups claiming to be “families” — stood a good chance of gaining admission to the U.S.[227]

In July 2021, border apprehensions set yet another record, at 213,534. Meanwhile, the number of unaccompanied minors also reached an all-time one-month high of more than 19,000. Approximately 117,000 of the 212,672 were quickly released into the U.S. interior, despite: (a) an absence of evidence to indicate that they met the criteria necessary to win approval for their asylum claims, and (b) federal law requiring that they be detained until their asylum claims were decided by a judge.

In August 2021, the total number of border apprehensions was 208,887. Approximately 115,500 of them were quickly released into the U.S. interior.

In September 2021, a total of 192,001 migrants were encountered at the border by American immigration authorities. As Fox News noted, this meant that there had been “more than 1.7 million encounters at the border in FY 2021, marking the highest number for a fiscal year on record.”

In October 2021, the total number of border apprehensions was 158,575.

In November 2021, the total number of border apprehensions was 173,620.

In December 2021, the total number of border apprehensions was 178,840.

In January 2022, the total number of border apprehensions was 153,941.

In February 2022, the total number of border apprehensions was 164,973.

In March 2022, the total number of border apprehensions was 222,144.

In April 2022, the total number of border apprehensions was 234,088.

In April 2022 as well, DHS Secretary Mayorkas exempted some 137,000 migrants from Title 42 restrictions and permitted them to enter the United States, out of the 234,088 who were encountered by border-security personnel that month. But in addition to that 137,000 figure, another 60,000 or so were able to sneak across the border, undetected.

In May 2022, the total number of border apprehensions was 232,628.

In December 2022, the total number of border apprehensions (both at and between U.S. ports of entry) exceeded 250,000, the highest monthly total ever recorded.

Very Few Released Migrants Report to ICE Offices As Required 

On July 28, 2021, it was reported that just 6,700 of the roughly 55,000 illegal migrants who, during the preceding three months, had been released into the U.S. without a court date and directed to report to ICE within the next 60 days, had actually contacted ICE in compliance with those terms.  At the time of their release, the migrants were given a list of addresses and contacts for ICE offices nationwide and were instructed to report to one of them after reaching their desired destination.

Federal Judge Orders Biden Administration to Resume “Remain in Mexico” Policy

On August 13, 2021, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — ruling on a lawsuit that had been brought jointly by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the state of Missouri — ordered the Biden administration to resume the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy vis-a-vis asylum seekers. In accord with President Biden’s wishes, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had terminated the Trump policy — formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — with a June 1, 2021 memorandum.

Wrote Judge Kacsmaryk in his decision: “At the very least, the Secretary was required to show a reasoned decision for discounting the benefits of MPP. Instead, the June 1 Memorandum does not address the problems created by false claims of asylum or how MPP addressed those problems. Likewise, it does not address the fact that DHS previously found that ‘approximately 9 out of 10 asylum claims from Northern Triangle countries are ultimately found non-meritorious by federal immigration judges,’ and that MPP discouraged such aliens from traveling and attempting to cross the border in the first place.”

Kacsmaryk stayed his order for seven days in order to allow the federal government to seek relief at an appeals court.

On October 15, 2021, Biden Administration officials announced that in mid-November the MPP would be temporarily reinstated in compliance with Judge Kacsmaryk’s order. A Reuters report explained that even as the President was ostensibly re-instituting the program, he was working behind-the-scenes to terminate it once again. Said Reuters:

“President Joe Biden’s administration is taking steps to restart by mid-November a program begun under his predecessor Donald Trump that forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings after a federal court deemed the termination of the program unjustified, U.S. officials said Thursday [October 14].

“The administration, however, is planning to make another attempt to rescind the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly called the “Remain in Mexico” policy, even as it takes steps to comply with the August ruling by Texas-based U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the officials said.

“The possible reinstatement of MPP – even on a short-term basis – would add to a confusing mix of U.S. policies in place at the Mexican border, where crossings into the United States have reached 20-year highs in recent months. The administration said it can only move forward if Mexico agrees. Officials from both countries said they are discussing the matter.

“Mexico’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday that it has expressed a ‘number of concerns’ over MPP to U.S. officials, particularly around due process, legal certainty, access to legal aid and the safety of migrants. A senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ‘there is no decision at this point’ about the program’s restart.”

A Hotair.com analysis offered the following perspective on the motivations underlying Biden’s announcement:

“So in other words, the Biden administration is being forced to comply with the court order, but they want to leave themselves one big out. They want Mexico to balk at it in order to get around the court order, which is why the target date for the re-implementation has been pushed off to ‘mid-November.’ By signaling to Mexico that the plan relies on their agreement — and Mexico never did like the policy, only agreeing to it after Trump’s economic pressure left them little choice — they’re giving Mexico a veto that Biden and his team can use to explain non-compliance to the federal court.”

In late November 2021, the Biden administration stated that it would re-implement MPP without further objection within a few days. “In compliance with the court order, we are working to reimplement MPP as promptly as possible,” said DHS spokesperson Marsha Espinosa. “We cannot do so until we have the independent agreement from the Government of Mexico to accept those we seek to enroll in MPP. We will communicate to the court, and to the public, the timing of reimplementation when we are prepared to do so.”

On December 2, 2021, DHS released the following statement: “As required by a federal court order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been working in good faith to re-implement the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program. Today, in coordination with the Departments of State and Justice, DHS announced key changes to MPP to address humanitarian concerns raised by the Government of Mexico and shared by the U.S. Government.”

In 7-Plus Months, Biden Released Approximately 530,000 Illegal Aliens into the U.S. Interior

Between January 2021 and August 31, 2021, DHS released approximately 530,000 illegal border crossers into the United States. Many of them were given Notices to Appear (NTA) in immigration court, Notices to Report (NTR) to a DHS office somewhere in the U.S., or parole arrangements that allowed them to obtain work permits.

Aside from those 530,000, DHS estimated that nearly 30,000 additional people per month – i.e., close to 240,000 between January and August — had come into the U.S. illegally without ever having been detected by American border personnel. Such aliens are classified by immigration authorities as “got-aways.”

False Claims That Border Patrol Agents Are Whipping Illegal Haitian Migrants

During the week of September 19, 2021 – by which time more than 14,000 Haitians had recently gathered under the Del Rio International Bridge on the banks of the Rio Grande in hopes of gaining approval for asylum in the U.S. — the media were abuzz with accusations claiming that Border Patrol agents were using whips to prevent those Haitians from illegally entering the United States. Specifically, the controversy was sparked by photographs of agents mounted on horseback attempting to corral incoming migrants. Some photos showed the agents twirling their reins to coax the horses in certain directions. Many critics misidentified the reins as whips that were being used to harm and degrade the migrants.

Paul Ratje, the photographer responsible for the images in question, said that neither he nor any of his colleagues had seen Border Patrol agents whipping anyone. “Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses, and that’s when the whole thing happened,” Ratje explained. “I never saw them whip anyone. The agent was swinging the reins that to some can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the pictures.”

Rowdy Ballard — who, prior to retiring, had spent 17 years on horseback for the Border Patrol and had served 6 years as the horse coordinator for Del Rio, Texas — told Fox News: “We all have the same message: we don’t carry whips.” Explaining that the Border Patrol does not train its agents to whip illegal migrants, and that those agents hardly ever place their hands on people “unless they’re not compliant,” Ballard said on America’s Newsroom: “It was a tense situation. The horses were a little reluctant to do the job that the agents were asking… twirling the reins was just another tool they used to get the horses to do what they’re asking.”

Notwithstanding the fact that the “whipping” claims were entirely false, the Biden Administration quickly announced that: (a) horse patrols at the border would be immediately suspended pending further investigation of the charges, and (b) the specific agents in the aforementioned photos would remain on administrative duty while the probe was being conducted. Biden’s announcement prompted Rowdy Ballard to say: “The horse is a great tool we’ve used [at the Border Patrol] for almost 100 years now. And with that going, it’s going to be harder to patrol that area.”

President Biden said in response to the (false) reports: “It was horrible [what] you saw. To see people treated like they did [sic]. Horses nearly running people over and people being strapped.” “It’s outrageous,” he added. “I promise you those people will pay. They will be investigated. There will be consequences.”

Border Patrol agents reacted angrily to Biden’s remarks. One agent, for instance, told Fox News that Biden had “just started a war with Border Patrol,” adding: “I see the administration wants to fry our agents.” Another agent said: “Would you go to work and do your best knowing that if you do your boss is going to ‘make you pay?’ I’m dumbfounded and don’t know what to say. Is the president threatening to throw us in prison?” National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd called Biden’s comments “completely and totally outrageous” and accused the president of “playing politics with Border Patrol agents’ lives.” “Nobody was struck by a rein, not one person was struck by a rein, not one person was run over by those horses,” said Judd. “They used the tactics they were trained to use, to do the job [Biden] sent them out to do — these are executive branch employees. He sent them out there to do the job, and now he’s criticizing them because his base wants them to.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that President Biden and his entire Administration were “horrified by the photos of the Border Patrol officers and that behavior.” “We feel those images are horrible and horrific,” she added.

Vice President Kamala Harris said she was “outraged” by the “horrible and deeply troubling” images shown in the photos. “Human beings should not be treated that way,” she elaborated, “and as we all know, it also evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.”

Rep. Maxine Waters said at a press conference on September 22: “We’re saying to the president and everybody else: You’ve got to stop this madness. And I want to know, in the first place, who’s paying these [Border Patrol] cowboys to do this work? They’ve got to be gotten rid of. They’ve gotten to be stopped. It cannot go on.” Waters then told the reporters in attendance: “Write the story. Tell the story about what is going on. Let people know that they’re trying to take us back to slavery days – and worse than that.”

Rep. Ayanna Pressley described the “whip” controversy as “egregious and white supremacist behavior.” “Haitian lives are black lives,” she said. “They’re lives, and they’re black lives. And if we really believe that black lives matter around the globe, this is the moment to stand up.”

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that a full investigation was warranted. “One cannot weaponize a horse to aggressively attack a child,” he stated. “That is unacceptable. That is not what our policies and our training require. Please understand, let me be quite clear, that is not acceptable. We will not tolerate mistreatment, and we will address it with full force based on the facts that we learn.” Emphasizing that the matter was being investigated with “tremendous speed and force,” Mayorkas pledged that the probe would be completed within a “matter of days, not weeks.” 

Seven months later, when the DHS finally issued an April 2022 report concluding that no border patrol agents were guilty of having whipped migrants at the Southern border in September 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to address the matter with the media. Insisting that the probe was not yet over, she told reporters on April 18, 2022: “There is a process and an investigation. I’m sure we’ll have a comment on it after that.”

In October 2022, the Heritage Foundation released a September 24, 2021 DHS email — obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request — which proved that DHS Secretary Mayorkas, at the time of the “whipping” controversy in September 2021, was fully informed that the photographer who took the pictures of horseback Border Patrol agents had made it clear that neither he nor any of his colleagues had seen any migrants being whipped. “A DHS colleague sent an email to Mayorkas including a news interview with the photographer who captured the incident and claimed he didn’t see Border Patrol agents whip anyone,” reported the Daily Caller on October 12, 2022. Meanwhile, National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd told the Daily Caller that the email “prove[d]” that Biden administration officials “don’t care about the truth.” “They certainly don’t want the American public to know the truth,” he added. “They specifically withheld facts from the American people so that the narrative would go forward.” “They knew that it wouldn’t matter that the truth was going to come out later,” Judd continued, “because they know that the media is not going to cover it. So they went forward with a completely bogus story, misrepresenting facts and misleading the American public. That should not be tolerated from the President of the United States.”

More Than 12,000 Haitian Illegal Migrants Are Released into American Interior

All told, roughly 30,000 migrants passed through the Del Rio International Bridge area between September 9 and 24. Approximately 12,400 of them were released into the U.S. interior with instructions to report for immigration court hearings sometime in the future. Aside from those, about 2,000 were removed via 17 plane flights to Haiti under Title 42 provisions. Another 8,000 decided to return to Mexico voluntarily. Another 5,000 were processed by the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether they would be sent back to Haiti or permitted to pursue their immigration/asylum cases. And some 3,000 were in detention.

Many More Haitians Heading Toward U.S. Border

On September 25, 2021, PJ Media reported that, based on numbers provided by the Panamanian government, an additional 20,000+ Haitians were trekking northward through the Darien Gap — the roadless, dangerous, 66-mile sliver of jungle and swamp connecting Colombia and Panama — with their sights set on America’s southern border.

On October 1, 2021, Breitbart.com reported: “Mexican officials are concerned that more than 125,000 Haitian migrants are expected to be in their country by the end of 2021 with the majority trying to reach the U.S. border. However, the figure could be much higher due to migrants who enter Mexico without notifying authorities. The concerns expressed by officials range from law enforcement to humanitarian and sanitary issues since Mexico does not have the resources to absorb the influx.”

Biden Appoints Opponent of Border Security to Head the ICE Office Tasked with Prosecuting Illegal Aliens Facing Deportation

In late September 2021, President Biden appointed Boston-based immigration attorney Kerry E. Doyle to lead the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), whose duty is to prosecute illegal aliens facing deportation. A strong opponent of border security, Doyle in 2017 had co-filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s temporary suspension of immigration to the U.S. from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Venezuela.

“Doyle’s record extends also to initiating sanctuary legislation in local communities and [being] a critic of ICE as an enforcer of federal immigration law,” reported Breitbart.com. Former ICE senior advisor Jon Feere described Doyle as “a strong advocate of sanctuary policies” and a supporter of legislation that would bar local law enforcement from even inquiring about a suspect’s immigration status. “Disturbingly,” wrote Feere, “by opposing the 287(g) program Doyle is supporting the release of illegal aliens arrested for a litany of crimes in Massachusetts including manslaughter, armed carjacking, armed robbery, aggravated assault and battery, child rape, strangulation of a pregnant woman, assault and battery of a 60+/disabled person, kidnapping, home invasion, burglary, fentanyl trafficking, cocaine trafficking, carrying an unlicensed firearm, credit card and identity fraud, and drunk driving, to name a few crimes.”

No More Worksite Immigration Raids

In an October 12, 2021 memo issued to the Citizenship & Immigration Services (CIS) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP) agencies, Mayorkas announced that the DHS would now end all mass immigration-enforcement operations at worksites in the United States. Asserting that such operations should target employers of illegal migrants, rather than the migrants themselves, Mayorkas wrote: “The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative employers. These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a tool of retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations.”

Caravan of 60,000 More Migrants from Mexico Head Toward U.S. Southern Border

On October 21, 2021, a throng of possibly more than 60,000 migrants left the southeastern Mexico city of Tapachula and began a northward trek toward America’s southern border. According to the Post Millennial: “Mexican authorities made an attempt to stop them with agents in riot gear. However, they were severely outnumbered by the migrants, and didn’t stand a chance. The Mexican police line broke within seconds, and the migrants streamed through largely unopposed after that.” Notably, the migrants’ activities were highly organized and carefully orchestrated. As Fox News reported: “The caravan is not merely a group of migrants congregating together, organizers made migrants who wished to participate in the caravan to register with a QR code on their phones or a web link to participate.”

Biden Considers Paying $450,000 Apiece to Illegal Aliens Whose Members Had Been Separated  at the Border by Trump Immigration Authorities

On October 28, 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden Administration was contemplating the possibility of issuing massive compensatory payments to illegal-migrant families whose members had been separated from one another for extended periods — i.e., parents separated from children — when apprehended by immigration authorities at America’s southern border under the Trump Administration’s so-called “zero-tolerance policy,” which was in effect from April to June of 2018. According to people familiar with the matter, the average payment was expected to to be approximately $450,000 per person — for a grand total of about $1 billion in taxpayer funds. Said the Journal report: “[T]he U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services are weighing the payments as they work to resolve lawsuits claiming that the government subjected parents and children to lasting psychological trauma. […] The [zero-tolerance] policy made it so all adults who illegally entered the U.S., including those with children, were referred for prosecution. Children who entered with those adults were separated from them and placed into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services.” Lawyers for the migrant families and the U.S. government had told courts that they were hopeful of reaching a final agreement by the end of November.

On November 3, 2020, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Biden about the Wall Street Journal report: “As you were leaving for your overseas trip, there were reports that were surfacing that your administration’s planning to pay illegal immigrants who were separated from their families at the border up to $450,000 each, possibly $1 million per family. Do you think that that might incentivize more people to come over illegally?” The president responded angrily, “If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah. But it’s not true. […] That’s not going to happen.”

The ACLU, which had filed a 2019 class action lawsuit representing the migrants in their case against the Trump Administration and was involved in negotiating some of the settlements, condemned Biden’s denial. Said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero: “President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department as it carefully deliberated and considered the crimes committed against thousands of families separated from their children as an intentional governmental policy. But if he follows through on what he said [about not paying the migrants], the president is abandoning a core campaign promise to do justice for the thousands of separated families. We respectfully remind President Biden that he called these actions ‘criminal’ in a debate with then-President Trump and campaigned on remedying and rectifying the lawlessness of the Trump administration. We call on President Biden to right the wrongs of this national tragedy.”

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and a lead negotiator on one of the lawsuits, said: “President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied. That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.”

Meanwhile, a number of media outlets confirmed the veracity of The Wall Street Journal‘s original report.

On November 4, 2021, Deputy White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to walk back Biden’s assertion that the payments were “not going to happen,” saying: “If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government.”

On November 6, 2021, Fox News reporter David Spunt, in an effort to get Biden to clarify what would in fact happen with the migrants in question, said to the president: “You said last week that this report about migrant families at the border getting payments was garbage.” At that point, Biden interrupted  Spunt to say, “No, I didn’t say that. Let’s get it straight. You said everybody coming across the border gets 450,000 dollars.” Spunt then asked, “So the number is what you had the problem with?” Raising his voice and pointing his finger, Biden replied: “If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border — whether it was legal or illegal — and you lost your child. You lost your child, he’s gone, you deserve some kind of compensation no matter what the circumstances.” The president then added that he had “no idea” what the final settlement figure would be.

On December 17, 2021, Breitbart.com reported that the Biden Administration had decided against dispensing the $450,000 awards as a matter of course, and would instead address each case on an individual basis:

“President Joe Biden is reportedly dropping plans to provide $450,000 payouts to nearly 1,000 illegal alien families after fierce backlash from the American public. For months, Biden’s Departments of Justice (DOJ), Homeland Security (DHS), and Health and Human Services (HHS) were in settlement talks with border crossers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who claim they have suffered trauma as a result of former President Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. Now, ACLU attorneys involved with those talks have told the Wall Street Journal that the Biden administration has dropped the settlements previously considered to be upwards of $450,000 per border crosser […] Instead, the DOJ will litigate the border crossers’ claims individually. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told the Journal: ‘We are hardly naive that politics sometimes plays a role in Justice Department decisions, but it is shameful that it happened when the lives of little children are at stake. History will not look kindly on the Biden administration’s decision not to stand up for these small children.’”

Biden Has Flown 45,000 Illegal Aliens into the U.S., Permitting Many of Them to Use Arrest Warrants as ID to Bypass TSA Rules

From January 2021 through October 31, 2021, the Biden Administration oversaw the flight transportation of 44,957  illegal border crossers into the American interior, while a mere 620 such illegals were denied access to those flights — an approval rate of more than 98.6 percent. In many cases, the cost of these flights was paid in full by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that had contracted with the federal government. In January 2022, Breitbart.com reporter John Binder noted that these border crossers often received special privileges unavailable to American citizens and legal residents:

“All of the border crossers and illegal aliens used Department of Homeland Security (DHS) forms as their proof of identification, as Biden has allowed them to bypass standard TSA [Transportation Security Administration] rules where American citizens must show photo identification to board commercial flights. Most shockingly, perhaps, the forms border crossers and illegal aliens are allowed to use as official forms of identification for TSA include arrest warrants, deportation orders, Notices to Appear (NTA) in immigration court, and federal custody booking records. In addition, TSA officials confirmed that border crossers and illegal aliens boarding domestic commercial flights do not have to undergo health screenings beforehand.”

On July 21, 2022, John Binder reported:

“President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed that the administration this year has allowed nearly 1,000 illegal aliens to use arrest warrants and deportation notices as forms of identification to board domestic commercial flights in the United States. […] During a hearing on [July 21], Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) had TSA Administrator David Pekoske confirm that nearly 1,000 illegal aliens since the beginning of the year have been allowed to board U.S. flights with arrest warrants and deportation orders as forms of identification. ‘How many individuals have presented TSA with arrest warrants or deportation notices that were permitted to travel in this calendar year?’ Hawley asked, to which Pekoske responded ‘Under 1,000 sir.’

“Pekoske also noted that not all illegal aliens presenting arrest warrants and deportation orders at TSA airport checkpoints are subject to screenings involving an airport’s federal security director. ‘They have an interview with the [TSA] officers that are on scene at the checkpoint,’ Pekoske said. ‘… they will bring in the federal security director if needed … we aren’t looking if a person is legal or illegal in the country.”

Biden Administration Offers Parole & Possible Work Permits for Some Migrants

On November 8, 2021, Breitbart.com reported that according to a November 2 policy document authored by Raul L. Ortiz, Chief of U.S. Border Patrol, the Biden Administration was enacting a new release policy known as Parole + ATD (Alternatives to Detention). This policy would grant parole status to migrants in the Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio, the two busiest sectors for the southwest Border Patrol, allowing Border Patrol agents to quickly release migrants rather than confine them in detention centers. Whereas parole in the past had been reserved mostly for migrants who were either experiencing severe hardship or were serving as informants in criminal cases, the new policy would involve the issuance of a Notice to Appear (NTA) and the scheduling of an immigration hearing which would allow the migrants to avoid formal removal proceedings for a number of additional reasons. Explained the Breitbart report:

“The new policy allows migrants to be granted Parole + ATD when certain thresholds are met. Specifically, when the seven-day average of migrant encounters is greater than the sector’s Fiscal Year 2019 May daily average, and when certain custody levels are reached. In sectors other than Del Rio and the Rio Grande Valley, Parole + ATD must be approved by the Chief of the Border Patrol and the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, according to the document. […] The Parole + ATD policy does not address if migrants must submit financial information or if they are required to identify a sponsor.”

It was also possible that Parole + ATD would allow the released migrants to apply for temporary work authorization in accordance with a DHS policy guidance that stated: “If not inconsistent with the purpose and duration of parole, we may, in our discretion, grant a parolee temporary employment authorization. The parolee may request employment authorization after being paroled into the United States by filing Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization.”

Expulsions of Illegal Border Crossers Plummet Under Biden

During 2020 under the Trump Administration, 88% to 93% of all encounters between U.S. border authorities and illegal migrants resulted in the expulsion of the migrants. Those figures plummeted under the Biden Administration. From July through September 2021, the percentage of border encounters resulting in expulsion was a mere 47% to 54%.

On December 6, 2021, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reported:

“Immigration enforcement, as measured by the number of aliens removed from the country, has collapsed to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, according to ICE deportation records the Center [for Immigration Studies] has obtained. Under policies imposed by the Biden administration, removals dropped by 80 percent since last year’s low point during the pandemic lockdown, and by 90 percent since 2019, the last normal year for ICE operations. The number of aliens removed who had serious criminal convictions also has declined by over 50 percent from 2020 and by 65 percent since 2019. […]

On his first day of office (January 20, 2021), President Biden issued a directive halting virtually all deportations for 100 days and greatly restricting immigration enforcement activity. Following a lawsuit by Texas asserting grave fiscal and public safety harm to its citizens from a near-suspension of federal immigration enforcement, within two weeks federal judge Drew Tipton halted the deportation freeze and later enjoined it indefinitely pending further legal action. The restrictions on other enforcement actions have remained in place with some minor modifications, meaning that, in effect, ICE has been limited to removing known or suspected terrorists, aliens convicted of very serious crimes (mostly those defined as ‘aggravated felons’), and recent illegal arrivals. […]

“ICE was on pace to remove approximately 62,000 aliens for the entire 2021 fiscal year, down from about 186,000 in 2020, which was already a year of greatly reduced activity due to the pandemic. The total number of removals in 2019, a more normal year, was just over 267,000 […]

“[…] The primary justification given by Biden officials for the major changes in enforcement guidance is to enable the agencies to better concentrate on removing aliens who represent a threat to the public. […] Analysis of the information on criminal convictions of aliens removed by ICE over the last three years indicates that … a much smaller number of serious criminal aliens were removed — calling into question the claims that the Biden prioritization scheme is having a beneficial public safety impact.

“[T]he number of aliens with convictions for the most serious crimes who were removed during the same five-month period in 2019, 2020, and 2021…. ICE removed only 6,000 serious criminal aliens under Biden’s enforcement policies, compared to more than 17,500 removed during the same period in 2019 under pre-pandemic Trump policies. This [2021 figure] is just half the number of serious criminals who were removed during the same period in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, when ICE enforcement activity was greatly constrained.”

Biden Has Let Many Hundreds of Thousands of Unvaccinated, COVID-positive illegal migrants into the U.S. in 2021

In December 23, 2021, Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told podcast host Alex Marlow that President Biden, who had repeatedly stated that getting vaccinated was a “patriotic duty” for all Americans, was applying a completely different standard to illegal border crossers. Said Morgan:

“[Joe Biden] said that it’s unpatriotic for you not to get a vaccine. Meanwhile, it’s this president’s policies that have incentivized two million apprehensions during his first eleven and a half months of office. Another number that’s very important: 600,000 got-aways, That’s 600,000 illegal aliens that have broken into our country and invaded, and why? Because 60, 70 percent of our Border Patrol resources are pulled off the front line, pulled off the national security mission to process two million [migrants].

“Three million [migrants] in 12 months that tried to illegally enter our country, and guess what? Guess how many are being tested, and guess how many are being mandated to be vaccinated. Zero. So of the three million that have attempted — the six hundred thousand that have been successful, the other six, seven hundred thousand that this administration has allowed in to illegally enter — they’re not testing them, nor is there any vaccine mandate for those individuals, and they’re being flown to every town, city, and state in this country. On what planet does that make sense?

“The president gets out and talks about the [coronavirus] variant, and how it’s our patriotic duty to get vaccinated, while he knows that he’s allowing in tens of thousands every single week into this country unvaccinated, and we know that a minimum of 25 percent of the illegal aliens crossing our borders have active COVID.”

Migrants, Including Terrorists, from 160 Separate Countries Have Been Found at America’s Southern Border During Biden Administration

On January 12, 2021, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News that the Biden Administration was refusing to release information about the number of suspected terrorists who were among the massive numbers of people illegally crossing America’s southern border. Said McCarthy:

  • “The dirty little secret here—the part that scares me the most—is a number of our members went down to the border, and we went down very early, once the administration changed this behavior and these policies. When I was there, I was speaking to a border agent there in El Paso, and he told me they’re seeing more drugs than they’ve ever seen and that they’re catching people on the terrorist watchlist. It’s not just people from Central America. It’s people from 160 different countries. They have been catching people from Yemen, who are on the terrorist watchlist. Why would they be coming to America that way? What do they have planned for America? The fear I have now with what has happened in Afghanistan is people know how to come here and they come from all other countries. This is a real threat to America.”
  • “When they caught the people from Yemen, they didn’t catch them on the same day. Now, the administration will not release the number of people on the terrorist watchlist that they are catching. When I first brought this forward at the press conference, a Democrat on the other side of the aisle said I was lying. You know what’s interesting? That Democrat sits on the Intel Committee. That Democrat never apologized or did anything about it now. So if they knowingly have this information and the administration does, they need to put a stop to it because you need to protect America.”
  • “The interesting part is President Biden has been in elected office for more than 40 years and the closest he ever came to the border is driving by it in El Paso one time. Why wouldn’t he go visit it and know firsthand? It’s a responsibility and a problem he created with his own policy. There wasn’t one bill passed—it’s his policy, with one party rule, that has weakened America, put us in greater danger, and has spread COVID as well because of what’s coming across.”
  • “He [Biden] didn’t just open the door, he hung a welcome sign and encouraged you to come. But remember what happens when you do that. You don’t just get people illegally coming, you empower cartels. There’s going to be human trafficking. There’s going to be deaths. And then, speaking back to China, where does fentanyl come from? It comes from China. It has increased in America by more than 300 percent. Every single city in America is a border city today. If you speak to any single one of those communities along the border—I talked to one mayor, he had to shut down his school just in the first nine months 46 times. You know why? Because of the car chases from the cartels coming across and the shootings. You talk to the ranchers where they’re getting grandkids kidnapped or their houses burnt down. Why? Because [the cartels] want a free run across. Then we find that this president, he’s tying the hands of the border agents that are working overtime to try to to protect us. He is encouraging people to come here illegally and then what we found is he lies to the American public. When finally the American public sees those hundreds of thousands of people under the bridges, you got a Secretary who says we’re going to send them back but they lie to the American public and we find out months later they flew them all different places in America and no one is being tested for COVID. But he’s saying American can’t go out because of COVID.”

Biden Announces Plan to Provide Taxpayer-Funded Legal Help for Illegal Aliens

On January 21, 2022, Axios.com reported that the Biden administration was preparing to launch, within the next 60 days, a new Legal Access at the Border (LAB) program — overseen by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — to help prepare illegal migrants in seven border towns for the experience of navigating their way through the American immigration system. The seven border towns were (1) San Diego and (2) Calexico, California; (3) Nogales, Arizona; and (4) El Paso, (5) Eagle Pass, (6) Laredo, and (7) Brownsville, Texas. Though the plan would not directly provide the migrants with attorneys, it would commission contractors to provide them with individual and group orientations, pro bono referrals, and options for remote legal services. The LAB program would target not only migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, but also those already in Border Patrol custody, in the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, or otherwise in the midst of deportation proceedings.

Border Patrol Agents Deride & Denounce Mayorkas

When DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with and addressed Border Patrol (BP) agents in the Yuma Sector on January 26, 2022, one of those agents secretly recorded the proceedings. In that audio recording, Mayorkas could be heard saying: “The job has not gotten any easier over the last few months and it was very, very difficult throughout 2021. I know apprehending families and kids is not what you signed up to do. And now we got a composition that is changing even more with Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and the like, it just gets more difficult…. I know the policies of this administration are not particularly popular with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but that’s the reality and let’s see what we can do within that framework.”

At one point in the meeting, an agent asked Mayorkas how DHS was able to reconcile its claim that border security was the BP’s principal mission, with the fact that the Biden Administration was using BP agents not to patrol America’s southern border, but rather, to process the massive swarms of illegal migrants who were flooding across the U.S. border. When Mayorkas said he appreciated the agent’s “candor” and explained that he was striving to help the BP obtain all the personnel, funding, and equipment that it needed, the agent turned his back on Mayorkas as a sign of disrespect. At that point, Mayorkas said to the man: “Let me just say, you can turn your back on me but I’ll never turn my back on you.” In response to that, the agent stated that Mayorkas, by means of his policies, had actually turned his proverbial back on the agents first.

When another agent told Mayorkas that he and his colleagues found it “demoralizing” to see politicians and others routinely “demonize” Border Patrol agents, Mayorkas said he understood what it was like to be demonized — because threats had been made against his own life as well as the lives of his family members.

When yet another agent asked Mayorkas to comment about the small number of people who were being enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols — i.e., the “Remain in Mexico” program —  Mayorkas responded: “The numbers are not where they need to be. I agree with that.”

Regarding the overall border situation, Mayorkas at one point was recorded saying: “Look, it’s worse now than it, frankly, has been in at least 20 years, if not ever.”

Mayorkas Says He and Biden Are “100% Supportive” of Amnesty for Illegals Separated from Families

On January 31, 2022 — less than two months after the Biden Administration had decided to dispense with the politically radioactive idea of paying $450,000 apiece to illegal-migrant family members who had been separated from one another under the Trump Administration’s so-called “zero-tolerance policy” of April to June of 2018 — Mayorkas announced that the Biden team was now prepared to try a different approach. “We are advocating to Congress that they provide these individuals with legal status — that requires a statutory change,” Mayorkas said in an interview. “The White House is 100 percent supportive of it, as am I, and we continue to advocate vigorously for it.” Added Mayorkas: “I myself have met with some of the separated families. I learned firsthand the trauma that they endured and some continue to endure, and it is that that motivates us to make sure that any family that was separated by the prior administration is brought together again.”

By Late January 2022, Biden Has Resettled 75,000 Mostly Unvetted Afghan Refugees in the U.S.

During the six-month period from the beginning of August 2021 through the end of January 2022, the Biden Administration — with help from Welcome.us, a non-governmental organization created by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama with the financial support of corporations like Facebook and Microsoft — resettled more than 66,000 mostly unvetted Afghans in cities and towns across the United States. That figure was in addition to approximately 9,000 Afghans who were living in quasi-refugee camps on U.S. military bases in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Moreover, Breitbart.com reported on January 27, 2022, that President Biden was aiming to import and resettle about 2,000 additional Afghans into American communities each and every month thereafter, and to expedite the vetting and green card application process for those newcomers.

Planning to Terminate Title 42

On February 17, 2022, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his DHS completed the publication of a document titled “DHS Southwest Border Mass Irregular Migration Contingency Plan,” which outlined a so-called “February Strategy” that planned to discontinue “Title 42.” Title 42 was a Trump-era policy requiring the swift deportation of illegal migrants who were deemed to be public health risks in light of the COVID-19 epidemic — without allowing them an opportunity to apply for asylum. The new “February Strategy” would be founded upon a highly anticipated Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statement, which would be formally issued on March 12, announcing that due to “a public health reassessment,” the CDC Director was terminating Title 42.

The details of Mayorkas’ “February Strategy” were leaked to Breitbart Texas on April 4, 2022. In a section titled “Secretary’s Intent,” the document said: “The purpose of this plan is to describe a proactive approach that humanely prevents and responds to surges in irregular migration across the U.S. [southern border]. This will be done while ensuring that migrants can apply for any form of relief or protection [emphasis added] for which they may be eligible, including asylum, withholding of removal, and protection from removal under the regulations implementing United States obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Mayorkas in the document made clear his intention to limit, as much as possible, the use of detention and deportation in U.S. dealings with illegal migrants — even though federal law generally prohibited the entry of foreign workers and economic migrants into the United States. The document outlined ways in which border officials could maximize the entry of migrants: “Current pathways to removal [deportations] will be limited. Component use of broadscale release mechanisms (i.e., Own Recognizance [OR] with issuance of a Notice to Appear [NTA], or parole and Alternatives to Detention [ATD]) with administrative tools are necessary to ensure humane and efficient treatment of migrants.”

In a section titled “Focus on Whole of Western Hemisphere,” the document said: “The Plan is based on the idea that transnational problems require transnational solutions. The intent of this Plan is to provide the structure necessary to coordinate international public policies to prevent and respond to irregular migration while simultaneously seeking to improve economic and social conditions and provide opportunities for advancement to populations across the hemisphere to reduce the compulsion to migrate by: (l) Developing human talent. (2) Creating more and better jobs.”

The document mentioned housing a handful of times, but only in the context of housing large numbers of migrants in the U.S.  On page 28, for instance, the “Strategy” directed border officials to “coordinate occupational safety and health reviews of facilities housing ICE detainees and residents to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases.” On page 95, the report stated that the plan “requires that minors in INS custody must be housed in facilities that meet certain standards, including state standards for housing and care of dependent children.” Moreover, Mayorkas’ plan pledged to offer migrants the “opportunity to seek asylum, withholding of removal or deferral of removal before an Immigration Judge.”

Making no mention of the fact that federal law required the detention of migrants until such time as their asylum claims could be heard, Mayorkas’ plan instead used the word “detention” to describe an undesirable measure that should be avoided at all costs. For example, the plan noted that migrants could be detained if they happened to arrive in the U.S. at a pace faster than the rate at which officials could release them into the job market: “If the EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] is unable to increase the number of removal proceedings for migrants during a land migration surge, it will contribute to overcrowding at CBP Office of Field Operations and Border Patrol temporary holding facilities and ICE holding and detention facilities.”

Biden Administration Supports Citizenship for Immigrants Dependent on Welfare 

In February 2022, it was reported that President Biden’s deputies were rewriting the Trump-era “public charge” regulations that had been designed to make it more difficult for welfare-reliant immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship. “Under this [new] proposed rule, we will return to the historical understanding of the term ‘public charge’ and [migrant] individuals will not be penalized for choosing to access the [taxpayer-funded] health benefits and other supplemental government services available to them,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on February 17, 2022.

According to Breitbart.com, “The new rule cannot eliminate Congress’s Public Charge law. So it creates many exceptions that essentially make the law meaningless. For example, the draft regulation exempts many welfare programs from the definition of ‘public charge’”:

“DHS proposes that it not consider noncash benefits such as food and nutrition assistance programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Children’s Health Insurance Program, most Medicaid benefits (except for long-term institutionalization at government expense), housing benefits, and transportation vouchers. DHS would also not consider disaster assistance received under the Stafford Act; pandemic assistance; benefits received via a tax credit or deduction; or Social Security, government pensions, or other earned benefits.”

The draft regulation also exempted many categories of migrants from the public charge regulations:

“By law, many categories of noncitizens are exempt from the public charge ground of inadmissibility and would not be subject to the proposed rule. Some of these categories are refugees, asylees, noncitizens applying for or re-registering for temporary protected status (TPS), special immigration juveniles, T and U nonimmigrants, and self-petitioners under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).”

Biden Signs Spending Bill That Drastically Cuts Funding for CBP

On March 15, 2022, President Biden signed a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that raised domestic spending by $46 billion (nearly 7%) while cutting $428 million in funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), thereby lowering the CBP budget to $14.8 billion. The New York Post noted:

“The nosedive comes as illegal-immigrant apprehensions along the southwestern border skyrocketed in February to nearly 165,000, a 6.6% increase over January — and a 350% increase over February 2020, just after Biden took office and threw open America’s doors. [… ] Authorities are bracing for a colossal crush of up to 170,000 people once the administration lifts the Title 42 public-health authority allowing (but not mandating) quick expulsion. President Donald Trump instituted Title 42 at the pandemic’s start, and it’s been upheld in court under Biden.”

More Than 1.5 Million Entered U.S. Illegally during First 14 Months of Biden Administration

On April 14, 2022, the Center for Immigration Studies issued a report that stated: “The numbers are clear: DHS has released more than 756,000 aliens encountered by CBP at the Southwest border into the United States since Joe Biden became president, not counting 146,000-plus unaccompanied children released by HHS to sponsors and [an estimated] 620,000 aliens who evaded apprehension.” In short, more than 1.5 million people had entered the U.S. illegally via the southern border during the first 14 months of the Biden administration.

Influx of Fentanyl Skyrockets Under Biden

During the April 2022 launch of a Republican-led congressional caucus focusing on the rising influx of fentanyl into the United States, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Mark Dunbar noted that fentanyl seizures at the border had grown dramatically during the course of the preceding 12 months. “Across sectors, we’re seeing the amount of fentanyl coming across the border almost doubling,” he said. “What we’re seeing coming across is equal to the amount of Americans who are dying from it in the U.S.” Dunbar explained that this fentanyl was mostly flown from China to Mexico, where Mexican drug cartels then trafficked large quantities of it into the United States, mostly undetected.

The total amount of fentanyl seized by U.S. border agents grew from approximately 2,800 pounds in Fiscal Year 2019, to 4,800 pounds in FY 2020, to 11,200 pounds in FY 2021, to 5,300 pounds during the first half of FY 2022.

In April 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that during the preceding 12 months, more than 100,000 Americans had died from drug overdoses — and nearly two-thirds of those deaths had been due to fentanyl. This made fentanyl the  leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45 — surpassing suicide, COVID-19, and vehicular accidents. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Anne Milgram, meanwhile, stated that the amount of fentanyl that had been trafficked illegally across the southern U.S. border in 2021 was enough, in terms of its aggregate lethality, “to kill every American” — i.e., more than 300 million people.

Democrat Rep. Cuellar Says “It’s Literally an Open Border”

During an April 22, 2022 appearance on the Fox News Channel’s Your World, Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas — acknowledging the likelihood that President Biden would soon terminate Title 42 — said the following about the situation at America’s southern border:

“[T]he metric that I think they’re looking at is, how do we move the migrants faster from the border to the interior? And I don’t think that’s a plan, with all due respect. And this is why there [are] other Democrat senators and congressmen that have a problem. Because what we’re seeing is it’s literally an open border. It’s an open border. And the more people coming across and then Title 42 goes away, the numbers are going to definitely increase. And we’re going to see a situation where Border Patrol is going to continue to be overwhelmed.”

Gaetz to Mayorkas: “You Actually Don’t Want to Remove” Illegals

During a four-hour House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on April 28, 2022, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz confronted Mayorkas about the massive number of illegal aliens in America who had received final deportation orders but were nonetheless being permitted to remain in the country. “One point two million people are undetained, free, roaming about the country,” Gaetz began. “They’ve gone before a judge. A judge has issued a final order of removal. How many ICE agents do you need to deport them?” Mayorkas, who repeatledly suggested during the hearing that Congess should pass immigration reform statutes to address the border crisis, replied: “Congressman, I think what we need is legislation to fix a broken immigration system—”

Noting that the ICE agency needed no congressional approval in order to carry out deportations of people who had gone before a judge and received final orders of removal, Gaetz asked Mayorkas if he had any plans to remove the aforementioned 1.2 million. Mayorkas dodged the question and instead indicated that a lack of “resources” was making it difficult to deport people.

Gaetz then asked, “How much money do you need to deport all of them? How much money? How many agents to deport the 1.2 million who a judge has said have no right to be here?” Mayorkas answered, “Congressman, there are a number of questions that your question raises with respect to whether all of those individuals actually have been given due process—” At that point, Gaetz interrupted Mayorkas to correct him, saying: “No, no, no, they have. These are the people who have had their due process, ok? And here’s the point. You have no plan to remove them. You don’t know how many ICE agents it would take and you don’t know how much money it would take because you actually don’t want to remove them.”

Gaetz’s questioning of Mayorkas also included the following exchange:

GAETZ: “So, do you think that it just might be the case that one reason that we will encounter the highest number of illegal immigrations in our nation’s history this month and next month is because everybody knows that even if they come here, even if they go through the removal procedures, even if a judge issues a final order, you [Mayorkas] still think that there might be more due process? And you have no plan to remove them, and when I ask you what the plan is, you say, ‘Oh, well, resources.’ I go back to my first question, how many ICE agents to remove the 1.2 million?”

MAYORKAS: “I’d be pleased to provide you with the resourcing data subsequent to this hearing, if I may—”

GAETZ: “I think it’s telling that you’ve got plans for pronouns and you’ve got plans for misinformation, but when it comes to the plan to remove the people that have had due process, you don’t have one at all.” […]

MAYORKAS: “So if I could return to data because I want to make sure that you have accurate information—”

GAETZ: “Everyone knows that you have more people coming in than ever and you’re removing fewer people than ever and it’s because you have no plan and because it’s on purpose. See, I don’t buy the theory that you don’t know how to do this. I think you’re actually a highly competent dude. But the reality is your plan is to bring these people in and to send the message to the smugglers and the criminals that they will never have to leave.”

Gaetz concluded his remarks by saying: “I think we ought to use the best tools in the country to find these folks, round them up like they were at the Capitol on January 6, and deport every last one of them.”

Federal Judge Orders Biden to Keep Title 42 Alive

On May 20, 2022, a federal judge blocked President Biden’s plan to end Title 42, ordering federal agencies to continue the program because its termination would likely violate federal law. As Neil Munro of Breitbart.com observed, the political ramifications of the judge’s order were somewhat nuanced: “The decision is a win for President Joe Biden — but is also a win for the opponents of Biden’s easy migration policy. Biden wins because he can keep using Title 42 to manage the migrant inflow. Without Title 42, many more migrants would rush the border, forcing TV news executives to broadcast dramatic videos on the evening news. Also, he can blame the judge when his pro-migration allies want to blame someone for the Title 42 barrier.”

Biden Makes It Easier for Terrorists to Enter the U.S.

In late June 2022, the State and Homeland Security Departments, according to a policy published in the Federal Register, amended federal immigration laws in order to permit the granting of “immigration benefits or other status” to foreigners who had provided “insignificant material support” — e.g., “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” — to designated terror groups. “The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country,” reported the Washington Free Beacon. “Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.”

Added the Free Beacon: “A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. […] The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.”

Jewish Institute for National Security of America fellow Gabriel Noronha, who had served in the Trump administration as a State Department special adviser for Iran, said: “[T]he Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there. Instead, this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations. […] At best this is a horribly written regulation. At worst, it’s an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of Congress and the American people and make it easier for terrorists to come to America.”

Supreme Court Says Biden Can Repeal the “Remain in Mexico” Policy

On June 30, 2022, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision stipulating that the Biden administration could, as it wished to do, repeal the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. As Fox News reported: “The court’s majority pointed to the language in the law that says the government ‘may return’ migrants to a contiguous territory [Mexico], noting the ‘discretionary’ nature of the wording.”

Mayorkas Says Biden Administration Is Doing “Good Job” at the Border

During a July 3, 2022 appearance on ABC’s This Week, Mayorkas told anchor Martha Raddatz that he thought the Biden administration was doing a “good job” managing America’s southern border:

RADDATZ: What is the plan on the border? You really do have migrants flooding that area. The peak was during the Trump administration, May of 2019, at 144,000 crossings. In May of this year, you hit 240,000 crossings. You may be telling people to stay away, but they keep coming.

MAYORKAS: I think we saw the tragic result of people taking the dangerous journey in San Antonio just recently, when 53 people lost their lives in the most horrific of conditions in the back of a trailer truck. We continue to warn people not to take the dangerous journey. We are enforcing our laws. And we are working with countries to the south, including our close partner, Mexico, but with Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, to really address the migration that is throughout the Western Hemisphere. These are remarkably distinct times, and we have a multifaceted approach, not only to work with our partner countries but to bring law enforcement to bear, to attack the smuggling organizations in an unprecedented way. We are doing so very much. Ultimately, however — ultimately, because the border has been a challenge for decades — ultimately, Congress must pass legislation to once and for all fix our broken immigration system.

RADDATZ: But — but, Mr. Secretary, that does not look likely. And you have Congressmen Henry Cuellar saying that only about 30% of the Border Patrol are doing missions at checkpoints and the border because the other 70% are tied up at detention centers. How do you fix that? Again, the message is not getting out.

MAYORKAS: Well, we are continuing to deliver that message, and we will continue to do so. And for the first time since 2011, the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget calls for 300 more Border Patrol agents. And we are hiring case processers. We are addressing this issue vigorously and aggressively, to address the amount of — the number of encounters that we are experiencing at the southern border.

RADDATZ: Just a simple question: Do you think it’s working?

MAYORKAS: I think that we are doing a good job. We need to do better. We are focused on doing more, and we are doing it with our partners to the south. This is a — this is a phenomena that not only the United States is experiencing. Colombia now has more than 2 million Venezuelans within its borders. Costa Rica has indicated that 2% of its population is Nicaraguan, and that might rise to 5%. The migration that is occurring throughout the hemisphere is reflective of the economic downturn, increase in violence throughout the region, the — the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of climate change. We’re really in a — in a regional challenge, and we are addressing it with our regional partners.

1,600 Previously Convicted Criminals Were Caught Crossing into One Texas Border Sector in FY 2022

On July 24, 2022, Breitbart.com reported that in the Del Rio Sector alone, Border Patrol officials had apprehended more than 1,600 previously convicted criminal migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally during Fiscal Year 2022.

Cartels Are Earning 26 Times More Money Under Biden Than They Earned Under Trump

A July 25, 2022 New York Times report stated that according to Homeland Security Investigations, the cartels and coyotes responsible for smuggling migrants illegally into the United States were now earning $13 billion per year under President Biden’s lax border agencies — a figure 26 times larger than the $500 million that the cartels had earned annually under former President Trump’s border policies. “The cartels and coyotes earn the money via smuggling contracts, high-interest loans, and border extortion, and by trafficking indebted migrants into indentured-servitude, cartel-controlled jobs throughout the United States,” said the Times piece, adding that “the enterprises have teams specializing in logistics, transportation, surveillance, stash houses and accounting.”

Biden Administration Decides to Fill Gaps in Trump’s Border Wall in Arizona

On July 28, 2022, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas authorized the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to seal four separate gaps in former President Trump’s uncompleted border wall near the Morelos Dam just west of downtown Yuma, Arizona. Those gaps had become a major thoroughfare for illegal migrants crossing into the United States. The DHS claimed that the area “presents safety and life hazard risks for migrants attempting to cross into the United States where there is a risk of drownings and injuries from falls.”

In light of the Biden administration’s decision, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at her regular briefing: “Why is the Biden administration building a border wall in Arizona?” .

“We’re not finishing the wall,” Jean-Pierre replied. “We are cleaning up the mess the prior administration left behind in their failed attempt to build a wall.”

“But President Biden, when he was a candidate, said, ‘There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,’” Doocy noted, referencing an August 2020 statement by Biden. “So what changed?”

“We are not finishing the wall,” Jean-Pierre repeated.

“If walls work in that part of Arizona,” Doocy asked, “is this the administration trying to get migrants to cross somewhere else, like in Texas? What is the point?”

Jean-Pierre again said, “We are not finishing the wall. We are cleaning up the mess that the prior administration made. We are trying to save lives. This is what the prior administration left behind that we are now cleaning up.”

“By finishing the wall, is this —” Doocy continued.

“We are not finishing the wall,” Jean-Pierre interrupted.

“By filling in, finishing —” Doocy said.

“We are not finishing the wall,” Jean-Pierre again interjected.

Doocy then asked, “By filling in [the wall], is this racist? Because in 2019, when the former guy [Trump] was proposing a wall, you said that it was his racist wall. So how is this any different?”

“I’m not even sure how you get [from] your first question to this question that you just asked me,” Jean-Pierre replied. “A border wall is an ineffective use of taxpayer dollars … Just recently, CBP reported that new bollard fencing along the Southwest border was breached 3,272 times between fiscal year 2019 and 2021, requiring $2.6 million in repairs. It’s ineffective. We are not finishing the wall. We are cleaning up the mess that the last administration made.”

The principal motivation for the Biden administration’s action seemed to be the fact that with the November midterm elections just over three months away, American voters were disenchanted with Biden’s open-border policies  — policies that were likely to have very direct implications for the political fortunes Democrat U.S. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who the day before had praised DHS for filling in the gaps in the wall.

NYC’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams Announces That His City Will Welcome Illegal Aliens with Open Arms

During a press conference in late July 2022, NYC Mayor Eric Adams told his constituents that it was their civic duty to welcome the fact that their schools, hospitals, roads, and neighborhoods were being inundated with the many illegal aliens who were settling in New York City, as in many other cities, during the Biden administration. Among the mayor’s remarks were the following:

  • “Number one, this is an opportunity for New Yorkers to move away from ‘Not In My Backyard.’ We all must share the crisis. Our approach has been to divide up the homeless issue even prior to the asylum seekers by councilmanic districts. Now with this influx of people seeking asylum and support, now we have to go beyond that. We’re looking at the potential for emergency shelters in hotels and other facilities … If there was ever an all-hands-on-deck moment, this is it … [O]ur system was inundated with those who were seeking shelter because of the callousness of those other states that were pushing them out.”
  • “We’re here, we’re receiving them, and everyone is going to have to be on board. And we can’t have the historical ‘I believe people should be housed but just don’t house them on my block.’ Everyone’s block is going to be impacted by this. And so we have to add our advocacy with our ability to help our neighbors. We need everyone on board with this.”
  • “As I said last week, our schools are going to be impacted, our healthcare system is going to be impacted, our infrastructure is going to be impacted … we’re going to need all New Yorkers to be with us on this.”

In response to Adams’ remarks, Texas Governor Greg Abbott subsequently sent New York City two buses filled with dozens of illegal aliens who had recently entered Texas unlawfully. “In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Abbott said in a statement on August 5. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.” Adams, in turn, said at an August 7, 2022 news conference: “This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing.” Moreover, Adams complained that Abbott’s administration was not giving NYC authorities advance notice vis-a-vis when the migrants could be expected to arrive in New York. “They’re not letting us know when the buses are leaving. They’re not letting us know what are the needs of the people on the bus. They are not giving us any information, so we’re unable to really provide the service to people en route.”

At a news conference on August 9, 2022, Adams suggested that he himself might lead a busload of New Yorkers down to Texas to campaign against Governor Abbott. “I already called all my friends in Texas and told them how to cast their votes,” said Adams. “And I am deeply contemplating taking a busload of New Yorkers to go to Texas and do some good old-fashioned door knocking because we have to, for the good of America, we have to get him [Abbott] out of office.”

On August 17, 2022 — at a time when average apartment rentals in NYC had recently reached an all-time high of $3,500 per month — the New York Post reported that the Adams administration was scrambling to find thousands of hotel rooms in which it could house the illegals who were flooding into the city:

“City officials are urgently seeking another 5,000 rooms in Big Apple hotels to house migrants bound for New York City from the southern border…. There is no price tag attached to the request that was released Wednesday [August 17], which was made under the emergency contracting powers invoked by Mayor Eric Adams when the migrant crisis first began in the city. It marks a dramatic expansion of the city’s efforts to secure temporary housing for the recent arrivals, sources say.

“The Department of Homeless Services had previously asked nonprofit social service providers to send in proposals to rent rooms and provide aid for 600 families set to be housed in a luxury Midtown hotel, the Row NYC on 8th Avenue. The new request for providers to secure thousands of rooms in hotels across the city is in addition to that, city officials confirmed. And it would come on top of the estimated 200 already secured and providing housing for families at the Skyline Hotel on 10th Avenue. If fully implemented, it would bring the number of hotel rooms rented for migrants in the city shelter system up to nearly 6,000. City Hall estimates that more than 4,000 migrants, many of whom are seeking asylum, have arrived in the five boroughs in recent weeks — and have become the subject of a high-profile feud between Hizzoner and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.”

A New York Post analysis calculated that NYC “could be on the hook for more than $300 million per year to provide shelter space in hotels for newly arrived migrants.”

Meanwhile, at a mid-August “Resource and Family Fun Day” event organized for illegal migrants and their children by the New York City hospital system, hundreds of migrants lined up outside Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to take advantage of free giveaways of items like food, library cards, cell phones, back-to-school supplies, and health care coverage (offered by MetroPlusHealth).

“Lawful Pathways”: Biden Admin Secretly Arranges for Hundreds of Thousands of Illegals to Enter U.S. Unobstructed

In 2022, the Biden administration launched a “lawful pathways” strategy designed to artificially and deceptively suppress the official tally of people who were crossing America’s southern border illegally — so as to minimize the negative political consequences that might afflict the administration if such inordinately large numbers of illegal newcomers continued to swarm across the border in a chaotic, unregulated manner. Under “lawful pathways,” the DHS began trying to persuade tens of thousands of aspiring illegal border-crossers each month to resolve that, rather than trying to sneak into the United States undetected, they would instead use the CBP One smartphone application to make formal appointments to meet with U.S. officials at any of 43 separate land ports-of-entry in the American interior. When the aliens subsequently arrived at the designated land ports in order to keep those appointments, DHS welcomed them, and U.S. Customs officials quietly “paroled” them into the country. The aliens were then free to travel to any U.S. location of their choice and await their eventual asylum hearing.

In January 2023, the Biden administration initiated a “direct-flight” program as a new, added facet of the “lawful pathways” strategy. According to data obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request, this program flew at least 221,456 illegal aliens from their homelands to airports across the United States between January and mid-September of 2023. These included 76,582 Haitians, 63,360 Venezuelans, and 46,794 Cubans, as well as many others from Colombia, Nicaragua, Ukraine, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. These migrants also used the aforementioned CBP One smartphone application to request “advance travel authorizations” to take commercial passenger flights (“at their own expense”) directly to American airports in their cities of choice, where they were greeted by U.S. Customs officers who secretly “paroled” them into the United States.

During the 12 months immediately preceding the beginning of March 2024, the Biden administration’s direct-flight program transported a total of some 320,000 new illegal aliens into the United States. On March 5, 2024, the CEO of Twitter/X, Elon Musk, posted a message on his social media site: (a) warning that “the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11”; and (b) predicting that it was “just a matter of time” before America would face another major terrorist attack. “This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Musk added.

Biden Seeks Permanent Resettlement for More Than 72,000 Afghans Despite Widespread Vetting Failures

On September 10, 2022, Breitbart.com reported:

“President Joe Biden is looking to permanently resettle over 72,000 Afghans across American communities amid allegations of widespread vetting failures during the operation that brought more than 86,000 Afghans to the United States over the last year.

“Following the U.S. Armed Forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Biden opened a refugee pipeline that allowed about 72,550 Afghans to secure ‘humanitarian parole’ — many without having to be screened or interviewed in person beforehand. In a funding package issued by the White House, Biden is looking to allow those more than 72,000 Afghans to adjust their parole status to gain green cards, making them permanent United States residents who could get naturalized American citizenship in five years. […]

“Green cards for Afghans would become available even as federal investigators and whistleblowers have alleged enormous fraud and abuse, along with failed vetting procedures, in the massive Afghan resettlement operation. Most recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General issued a bombshell report detailing how Biden brought Afghans to the United States who were ‘not fully vetted’ and may ‘pose a risk to national security.’  Two Afghans, in particular, were resettled in American communities by the Biden administration who were later found to be national security threats with ties to terrorism. One of those Afghans has already been deported, while DHS officials said the other is in deportation proceedings.

“Similarly, a Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General report revealed that Biden’s agencies failed to properly vet Afghans arriving in the United States, and that about 50 Afghans were flagged for ‘significant security concerns’ after their resettlement. Most of the unvetted Afghans flagged for possible terrorism ties, the report states, have since disappeared into American communities. The report noted that as of September 17, 2021, only three of 31 Afghans flagged with specific ‘derogatory information’ could be located.

“In addition, a Project Veritas report alleges that the Biden administration resettled Afghans listed on the government’s ‘Terrorism Watch List’ in communities across America. In August, a federal whistleblower came forward to allege that the Biden administration resettled nearly 400 Afghans in American communities who are listed in federal databases as ‘potential threats to national security.’  Despite the allegations, Biden has imposed policies to loosen vetting standards.”

Illegal Aliens Candidly Tell Reporter That “The Border Is Open”

In September 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris said: “The border is secure…. We have a secure border, in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration.” Shortly thereafter, however, Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins interviewed some members of a group of illegal aliens whom Texas Governor Greg Abbott had transported to Harris’ home in Washington, D.C. and asked them if they believed the border was open or closed. Said one of those illegals: “The border is open…. Everybody believes that the border is open. It’s open because we enter. We come in, free, no problem…. We came illegally.”

Three Illegal Venezuelan Migrants File Class Action Lawsuit Against Florida Governor DeSantis

On September 20, 2022, three illegal migrants from Venezuela — identifying themselves as Yanet Doe, Pablo Doe, and Jesus Doe — collaborated with Alianza Americas (an activist nonprofit immigration corporation) to file a class action lawsuit against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and other Florida state government officials. The complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, alleged that when DeSantis and his administration had recently placed the Does and 47 additional illegals onto two private planes and flown them to the leftist enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, they were exploiting the migrants “for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial, and political interests.” Charging the defendants with 12 allegations of offenses that included negligent infliction of emotional distress, fraud/deceit, and false imprisonment, the suit further claimed that: (a) people acting on behalf of DeSantis, Florida Secretary of Transportation Jared Perdue, the Florida Department of Transportation, and the State of Florida, had entced the migrants to board the flight by “pretending to be good Samaritans offering humanitarian assistance”; (b) DeSantis and the other defendants had used $12 million of federal money from the Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund to pay the private-plane flight costs of $12,300 per passenger, or $615,000 altogether; and (c) “unidentified accomplices” had “induce[d] unwitting cooperation” from the illegals by offering them $10 McDonald’s restaurant gift certificates and paying for them to stay in private hotel rooms rather than in a migrant shelter. “Defendants manipulated them, stripped them of their dignity, deprived them of their liberty, bodily autonomy, due process, and equal protection under law, and impermissibly interfered with the Federal Government’s exclusive control over immigration in furtherance of an unlawful goal and a personal political agenda,” the lawsuit stated.

But a source in close contact with the ground operation that had relocated the 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, claimed that all of the migrants had been permitted to make fully informed decisions before boarding the planes. “Yes, they were asked multiple times if they wanted to go,” said the source.  Moreover, DeSantis’ office made public the consent forms which the migrants had signed before boarding.

With regard to the charge that DeSantis had improperly used Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund money to pay for the migrants’ flights, the governor’s communications director, Taryn Fenske, said: “As you may know, in this past legislative session the Florida Legislature appropriated $12 million to implement a program to facilitate the transport of illegal immigrants from this state consistent with federal law.”

“It is opportunistic that activists would use illegal immigrants for political theater,” Fenske also stated. “If these activists spent even a fraction of this time and effort at the border, perhaps some accountability would be brought to the Biden Administration’s reckless border policies that entice illegal immigrants to make dangerous and often lethal journeys through Central America and put their lives in the hands of cartels and Coyotes.” Added Fenske: “The transportation of the immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was done on a voluntary basis. The immigrants were homeless, hungry, and abandoned – and these activists didn’t care about them then. Florida’s program gave them a fresh start in a sanctuary state and these individuals opted to take advantage of chartered flights to Massachusetts. It was disappointing that Martha’s Vineyard called in the Massachusetts National Guard to bus them away from the island within 48 hours.”

In addition, Governor DeSantis himself issued the following remarks during a September 19, 2022 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity:

“Millions of people since Biden has been president illegally coming across the southern border. Did they freak out about that? No. You had migrants die in the Rio Grande, you had 50 die in Texas in a trailer because they were being neglected. Was there a freak out about that? No, there wasn’t. You’ve had criminal aliens get across the southern border and victimize Americans, killing some, raping some. Was there any type of outrage about that? No. And then, of course, we know fentanyl deaths are at an all-time high? Where is that fentanyl coming over? It’s coming over the open southern border.

“It’s only when 50 get put into Martha’s Vineyard – which wasn’t saying they didn’t want this, they [the governing boards of Martha’s Vineyard] said they wanted this. They said they were a sanctuary jurisdiction. These [migrants] were people who were basically destitute and then put in a situation where they could have succeeded, but that was all virtue signaling [by the governing boards of Martha’s Vineyard]. And not only did they [the governing boards of Martha’s Vineyard] not welcome them [the migrants], they [the governing boards of Martha’s Vineyard] deported them the next day with the National Guard. Give me a break!”

President Biden Says That Mass Migration Is Changing U.S. Demographics & Making America “So Much Better”

During a September 30, 2022 speech for National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15), President Biden celebrated what he viewed as the political benefits of the mass migration of Mexicans and Central Americans into the United States. “When in American history has there been a circumstance where one ethnicity has the potential to have such a profound impact on the direction of a country?” he asked rhetorically. “Twenty-six percent of every child who’s in school today speaks Spanish — 26 percent,” Biden continued. “We’ve had large waves of immigration before but the thing is, we just have so much opportunity to make this country so much better. I really mean it … so as my father would say, ‘Let’s go get ’em.’”

Assessing the Damage That Biden’s Border Policies Have Done So Far

On October 9, 2022, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock summarized the damage that Biden’s border policies had already done to the lives of the American people. Some key excerpts:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that the Mexican cartels’ income from smuggling illegal aliens into America has soared from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion this year — up 2,500%. […]

If Democrats still are dozing through the havoc of their no-border strategy, these figures might rouse them:

  • Border Patrol agents apprehended 951,568 illegal aliens during President Donald J. Trump’s final 19 months in office. In President Biden’s first 19 months, Border Patrol encountered a staggering 3,588,877 illegals — up a sickening 377%.
  • In Fiscal Year 2020, the last fully under Trump’s control, 69,000 illegal aliens were detected on the “border,” but got away into America’s interior. FY 2021 (four months of Trump, eight of Biden) witnessed 389,155 got-aways — up 464%. In FY 2022 (all Biden’s watch), got-aways hit 599,000 — up 54% versus FY 2021 and 768% compared to FY 2020.
  • “At least 266,000 unaccompanied migrant children/minors have been encountered at the southern border since President Biden took office, per CBP data,” Fox News Channel’s priceless southern-frontier correspondent Bill Melugin explained via Twitter on Sept. 26. “That’s enough to fill up approximately three Rose Bowls.”
  • Fourteen House Republicans wrote Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sept. 23 to complain that “between October 2021 and July 2022, more than 130,000 Venezuelan nationals were encountered after entering the United States illegally.” The Marxist Nicholas Maduro regime, they added, “is deliberately releasing violent prisoners early, including inmates convicted of ‘murder, rape, and extortion,’ and pushing them to join caravans heading to the United States.”
  • Twelve U.S. senators contacted the U.S. Marshals Service about crooks cascading across the “border.” According to their Aug. 30 letter, “So far in FY22, CBP has apprehended over 9,000 criminal aliens, including 53 for homicide or manslaughter, 283 for sex crimes, and almost 900 for assault, battery, and domestic violence.”
  • During Trump’s FYs 2017 through 2020, 11 terrorists on the watch list were captured at the border — two, six, zero, and three, in those respective years. Under Biden, Border Patrol apprehended 15 in FY 2021 and a terrifying 78 in FY 2022, through August 31; September’s figures will follow. How many terrorists got away? Who knows?
  • According to data from the United Nations’ Missing Migrants Project (MMP), during Trump’s final 20 months in office, 712 illegal aliens died on or near the U.S.-Mexico border. For Biden’s first 20 months, that number is 862 — up 21%. These fatalities range from drownings in the Rio Grande to the barbaric demise of 53 illegals whose four smugglers let them roast to death inside an abandoned truck. Officials discovered this carnage on June 27 in San Antonio, Texas. That day’s high: 97º Fahrenheit.
  • Fentanyl killed some 71,000 Americans in 2021, up 23% versus 2020. For those aged 18 to 45, fentanyl leads COVID-19, car wrecks, suicides and every other cause of death. It’s tragic enough when witting users fatally overdose on cocaine, heroin, or other fentanyl-laced contraband. Sadder still are those innocently poisoned via counterfeit, toxin-tainted “Adderall,” “Xanax” and other phony pharmaceuticals. Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine. Two milligrams in one pill can kill.

2.2 Million Illegals Were Apprehended at Border During FY 2022

On October 22, 2022, Breitbart.com reported:

“The year-ending Southwest Land Border Encounters Report released after hours Friday night confirmed an unofficial report published by Breitbart Texas earlier this month revealing the apprehension of just over 2.2 million migrants. The apprehension of 2,206,436 migrants who illegally crossed the southwest border between ports of entry is up by 547,230 over last year’s record-setting report. By contrast, during FY2020, President Donald Trump’s last year in office, Border Patrol agents apprehended only 400,651.

“[M]ore than 57 percent of [the] migrants apprehended came from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico — [while] Mexican migrant apprehensions jumped nearly 22 percent. The apprehension of migrants from all other nations totaled more than 947,000 migrants of the 2.2 million total.

“The biggest demographic increase in migrants apprehended came in the category of single adults. More than 70 percent of the total apprehensions were single adults. The 1,574,381 single adult apprehensions represent an increase of more than 48 percent over the prior year.”

“As quickly as border crossers and illegal aliens have been arriving at the southern border,” said a separate Breitbart piece, “Biden’s DHS has been just as quickly releasing most of them into American communities. From February 2021 to August 2022, for example, the Biden administration released about 1.35 million border crossers and illegal aliens into the U.S. interior — a foreign population roughly three times the size of Miami, Florida.”

“We have simply never seen these numbers before in our history, and the Biden open-borders policies are the reason,” said Heritage Foundation fellow and former CBP Chief Mark Morgan in a statement. “As bad as it has gotten, things will only get worse, and I fear what major catastrophe could come next.” Similarly, former Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said: “This is a shameful episode in our history, and the ones who are suffering are not the elites in their gated and secured Beltway communities. It’s the Border Patrol agents being overwhelmed on a daily basis. It’s the families who have been ripped apart losing a loved one to fentanyl or other drugs. And it’s the migrants themselves, who are worthless to the cartels once they’ve been paid. The next Congress better do something about it.”

98 Known or Suspected Terrorists Arrested at Border During FY 2022

As of October 25, 2022, a total of 98 known or suspected terrorists had been arrested at the U.S. southern border during the fiscal year 2022 — while the number of those who had escaped detection at the border was unknown. By contrast, only 26 terror watchlist people had been arrested at the border during the previous five years combined.

Biden Administration Refused To Help Guatemala Deport U.S.-Bound Illegal Migrants from Other Nations

On October 25, 2022, the Daily Caller reported:

“Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said the Biden administration refused to provide Guatemala with the tools to deport illegal migrants [from such places as Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Haiti, and other nations around the world] heading to the U.S. […] Giammattei told the [Daily Caller News Foundation] that he’d requested that the Biden administration move its deportation planes and buses to Guatemala for the country to use in returning [those] illegal migrants to their home countries before they reach the U.S. He said it would save the Biden administration hefty costs of such large migration waves and allow migrants from far away places to go home immediately. […]

“’Having all of these people in the United States costs the U.S. government millions and millions of dollars. We have suggested that they should keep the airplanes here, so that we ourselves can deport them back to their countries of origin, be it Haiti or be it whatever the country. If they keep their airplanes here, we can send them back. Otherwise, why wait until the people reach U.S. soil to then spend millions and millions of dollars to then send them back?’ Giammattei said. […] ‘We have also stated that we could use the buses to return these people to their countries of origin,’ Giammattei said. ‘And they [the Biden administration] have told us that they cannot do that because their laws don’t allow it.’ […]

“Despite … large amounts of [U.S.] aid for programs that support humanitarian, governance and health needs, as a few examples, Giammattei says there’s been little aid given to actually send illegal migrants back to their countries of origin. […] ‘We have requested assistance from the United States. And in this sense, we have received very little assistance,’ Giammattei said.”

Biden Vows to Provide Taxpayer-Funded Health Care for DACA Recipients

On April 13, 2023, President Biden announced that the hundreds of thousands of migrants who had been brought to the U.S. illegally as children and were covered by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, would soon be able to apply for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. “They’re American in every way except for on paper,” Biden said in a Twitter video. “We need to give Dreamers the opportunities and support they deserve.”

That same day, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated that his agency was “committed to doing everything in our power to preserve and fortify DACA.” Urging Congress to next pass an amnesty plan that would provide DACA illegals with green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship, Mayorkas said in a statement: “We support President Biden’s efforts to expand health coverage to DACA recipients. I am proud to have put the DACA program in place as Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2012. Over the past 11 years, DACA has provided over 800,000 young people with security in the only country many of them have ever known where they make significant contributions to their communities. We stand ready to work with Congress to provide permanent protection for DREAMers.”

With the End of Title 42, Biden Seeks to Implement “Parole Release” Policy for Migrants

The COVID-era border restrictions known collectively as Title 42, which had greatly limited access to asylum for migrants in the United States since March 2020, came to an end at 11:59 p.m. ET on May 11, 2023.

The end of Title 42 sparked a massive wave of illegal migrants surging to America’s southern border in hopes of being admitted into the country and gaining a permanent foothold therein. The Biden administration, meanwhile, announced its intent to implement a policy that would allow for the release of migrants into the U.S. interior without any assigned court dates. This policy was outlined in a Border Patrol memo stating that if the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency were to become inundated by hordes of migrants too numerous to process, they could be permitted to enter the country expeditiously on “parole release” — a process usually reserved for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” The Border Patrol memo referred to this practice as “parole with conditions” – whereby migrants would be technically required to either: (a) make an appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or (b) request that they be mailed a Notice to Appear. But they would not be assigned an alien registration number or a court date. And as Fox News reported on May 11, 2023, the number of migrants at the border was already massive: “Agents have been encountering over 10,000 migrants a day since [May 8], and there are no signs of that slowing down with the looming end of Title 42, which is expected to bring an even bigger wave with it.”

On the evening of May 11, 2023, federal judge T. Kent Wetherell II imposed a two-week restraining order to block the Biden administration from enacting its “parole with conditions” policy. Said Wetherell: “Putting aside the fact that even President Biden recently acknowledged that the border has been in chaos for ‘a number of years,’ Defendants’ doomsday rhetoric rings hollow because … this problem is largely one of Defendants’ own making through the adoption and implementation of policies that have encouraged the so-called ‘irregular migration’ that has become fairly regular over the past 2 years.”

In a May 11 statement, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody lamented that the lifting of Title 42 “presents an unprecedented crisis at our nation’s Southwest Border.” “The Biden administration did absolutely nothing to prepare for that crisis,” added Moody. “Then, just yesterday, it issued the Parole with Conditions mass release policy, which is virtually identical to the policy a federal judge already invalidated. These actions demonstrate a striking combination of incompetence and bad faith. I am pleased that a federal court understood the situation and acted appropriately.”

The Biden administration argued in a court filing that the restraining order on its parole policy would “irreparably harm the United States and the public by frustrating measures that are necessary to secure the border and protect the health and welfare of both migrants and Border Patrol Agents.”

Smuggler with Ties to ISIS Helps Migrants Enter Cross U.S. Southern Border

In August 2023, CNN.com reported:

“The FBI is investigating more than a dozen migrants from Uzbekistan and other countries allowed into the US after they sought asylum at the southern border with Mexico earlier this year, a scramble set off when US intelligence officials found that the migrants traveled with the help of a smuggler with ties to ISIS, according to multiple U.S. officials.

“While the FBI says no specific ISIS plot has been identified, officials are still working to ‘identify and assess’ all of the individuals who gained entry to the United States, according to a statement from National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson. And they are closely scrutinizing a number of the migrants as possible criminal threats, according to two U.S. officials…. For some counterterrorism officials, it shows that the U.S. is deeply vulnerable to the possibility that terrorists could sneak across the southern border by hiding amid the surge of migrants entering the country in search of asylum. […]

“The ISIS-linked smuggler is not believed to be a member of the terror group, but more like an independent contractor who has personal sympathies with the organization, according to U.S. officials.”

9,100 Illegal Migrants Enter U.S. in One Day

On September 14, 2023, the New York Post repo rted that in one recent 24-hour period, some 7,400 migrants had crossed illegally from Mexico into southern Arizona and surrendered to Border Patrol agents who placed them into custody, while another 1,700 had sought asylum at various ports of entry. Because the latter number was far beyond the capacity of Border Patrol personel to process, many of the migrants were, of necessity, released into the streets of Arizona. “A lot of these issues happen because the cartels, they’re the ones who control the border,” said National Border Patrol Council vice president Art Del Cueto.

Biden & Mayorkas Suddenly Decide to Build 20 Additional Miles of Border Wall

Late on October 4, 2023, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas — in a sudden about-face from the Biden administration’s longstanding claim that a border wall was both unnecessary and ineffective — quietly announced that an additional 20 miles of wall would be erected in the Rio Grande Valley border sector in Southeast Texas. Citing an “acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers” to prevent more people from entering the country illegally, Mayorkas said: “The United States Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of ‘high illegal entry. Therefore, I must use my authority . . . to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.”

To expedite the implementation of this plan, the Biden administration waived 26 separate federal laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

On October 5, 2023, President Biden claimed that he “can’t stop” construction of the new sections of the wall because Congress had not rescinded the spending that had been allocated for it during the Trump administration in 2019. “The money was appropriated [in 2019] for the border wall,” Biden told reporters. “I tried to get them to re-appropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t.”

Venezuelan Illegal Migrants Pour into U.S.

Between October 1 and November 2, 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 33,247 nationwide encounters with illegal migrants from Venezuela, a figure that exceeded the number of encounters with Venezuelans in every other single month during the preceding four years except: (a) the 54,890 encounters in September 2023, and (b) the 33,754 encounters in September 2022.

Number of Migrants Who Got into U.S. after Crossing Border Illegally in FY 2023 Exceeded Populations of 11 States

According to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of federal data, the roughly 1.5 million migrants who went free into the American interior after crossing the southern U.S. border illegally in fiscal year 2023 exceeded the populations of eleven separate U.S. states. That 1.5 million figure included 908,669 illegals who were released by the Border Patrol on humanitarian grounds following apprehension, along with another 600,000+ “got-aways” who were known to have snuck into the country without being apprehended.

The eleven U.S. states with populations of fewer than 1.5 million were: Wyoming (581,381), Vermont (647,064), Alaska (733,583), North Dakota (779,261), South Dakota (909,824), Delaware (1,018,396), Rhode Island (1,093,734), Montana (1,112, 867), Maine (1,385,340), New Hampshire (1,395,231) and Hawaii (1,440,196).

Biden Administration Asks Supreme Court to Let Border Patrol Remove Razor Wire from U.S.-Mexico Border

In December 2023, a federal appeals court issued an injunction ordering U.S. Border Patrol agents to stop their practice of removing razor wire that Texas had installed on the banks of the Rio Grande at the direction of the state’s Republican Governor, Greg Abbott. Then, on January 2, 2024, the Biden administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn that decision and confirm that the Border Patrol had the legal authority to cut such barriers. “Federal law unambiguously grants Border Patrol agents the authority, without a warrant, to access private land within 25 miles of the international border,” the DOJ wrote in its appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Like other law-enforcement officers,” added DOJ, “Border Patrol agents operating under difficult circumstances at the border must make context-dependent, sometimes split-second decisions about how to enforce federal immigration laws while maintaining public safety. But the injunction prohibits agents from passing through or moving physical obstacles erected by the State that prevent access to the very border they are charged with patrolling and the individuals they are charged with apprehending and inspecting.”

DOJ further argued that the appeals court ruling “removes a key form of officer discretion to prevent the development of deadly situations,” including “mitigating the serious risks of drowning and death from hypothermia or heat exposure.”

On January 22, 2024, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision allowing Border Patrol agents to resume cutting the aforementioned razor wire along Texas’ border with Mexico. According to the Associated Press: “None of the justices provided any explanation for their vote. The one-page order is a victory for the Biden administration while the lawsuit over the wire continues…. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor sided with the administration. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas voted with Texas.”

Biden Administration Sues Texas over Immigration Law

On January 3, 2024, the Biden administration sued Texas over what the administration characterized as that state’s “incredibly extreme” immigration law, Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), which was slated to take effect in March 2024. SB 4 not only gave local law-enforcement in Texas the authority to arrest migrants, but also gave judges statewide the power to order the removal and deportation of criminal aliens. Asserting that the state of Texas “cannot run its own immigration system,” the Biden administration argued that SB 4 encroached upon the federal government’s “exclusive authority” to enforce immigration law. Added the administration’s complaint: “Its [Texas’s] efforts, through SB 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations. SB 4 is invalid and must be enjoined.”

“SB 4 is clearly unconstitutional,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta in a statement. “Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and longstanding Supreme Court precedent, states cannot adopt immigration laws that interfere with the framework enacted by Congress. The Justice Department will continue to fulfill its responsibility to uphold the Constitution and enforce federal law.”

Former Border Patrol Chief Says He Never Once Spoke to Either Biden or Harris

During the March 3, 2024 broadcast of CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told correspondent Cecilia Vega that prior to his retirement in the spring of 2023, he he had not heard from either President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris even a single time. “I’ve never had one conversation with the president or the vice president, for that matter,” Ortiz recalled. “And so, I was the chief of the Border Patrol. I commanded 21,000 people. That’s a problem.”

170 House Democrats Reject Bill Calling for Arrest of Illegal Aliens Charged with Theft in U.S.

On March 7, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 7511, the “Laken Riley Act,” which sought to require federal officials to arrest illegal aliens charged with committing theft in the United States, by a vote of 251-170. All voting Republicans and 37 Democrats supported the bill, while 170 Democrats voted against it. The legislation was named in honor of Laken Riley, a young Georgia nursing student who had been brutally murdered in February by a 26-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela who was also a member of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang. Prior to killing Miss Riley, the perpetrator had already been arrested: (a) in New York City for driving an unregistered car with a 5-year-old child inside, and (b) in Athens, Georgia for stealing food and clothing from a Walmart store.

The text of H.R. 7511 read, in part, as follows: “The Biden administration should not have released Laken Riley’s alleged murderer into the United States; The Biden administration should have arrested and detained Laken Riley’s alleged murderer after he was charged with crimes in New York, New York, and Athens, Georgia; President Biden should publicly denounce his administration’s immigration policies that resulted in the murder of Laken Riley; and President Biden should prevent another murder like that of Laken Riley by ending the catch-and-release of illegal aliens, increasing immigration enforcement, detaining and removing criminal aliens, reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending his abuse of parole authority, and securing the United States borders.”

Biden Apologizes for Using the Word “Illegal”

During an MSNBC interview that aired on March 9, 2024, host Jonathan Capehart asked Biden to reflect on the moment during his recent March 6 State Of The Union address, when Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had heckled the president while the latter was discussing the border crisis. Specifically, Greene shouted, “say her name” and “what about Laken Riley?” — referring to a 22-year-old nursing student who had recently been murdered by an illegal alien from Venezuela. Biden, in respose to Greene, stated: “Lincoln (sic) Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right. But how many of the thousands of people being killed by illegals – to her parents, I say my heart goes out to you. Having lost children myself, I understand.”

Regarding Biden’s exchange with Greene, Capehart asked the president: “I noticed the look of surprise on your face when you walked into the chamber and you saw Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was priceless. You feigned shock at seeing her. But, during your response to her heckling of you, you used the word ‘illegal’ when talking about the man who allegedly killed Laken Riley.”

Biden responded, “Undocumented person. And I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’ I should have — it’s undocumented. And look, when I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of things I talked about on the border was the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood. I talked about what I’m not going to do, what I won’t do. I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country, the reason our economy is growing. We have to control the border and [have] more orderly flow, but I don’t share his view at all.”

“So, you regret using that word?” asked Capehart.

“Yes,” Biden answered.

FBI Director Wray Warns of Drug-Trafficking & Terrorist Threat at Border

On March 11, 2024, FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed that America’s southern border region was filled with “very dangerous threats,” including a smuggling network of jihadis with ties to the genocidal Islamic State (ISIS). “From an FBI perspective,” said Wray, “we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border. And that includes everything from drug trafficking — the FBI alone seized enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people — that’s just on the fentanyl side. An awful lot of the violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl.” Added Wray: “[T]here is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating. Exactly what that network is up to is something that’s, again, the subject of our current investigation.”

Biden Considers Using Guantanamo Bay to Process Possible Wave of Haitian Illegals

On March 13, 2024, the New York Post reported:

“The Biden administration is weighing a plan to use Guantanamo Bay to process Haitian migrants in the case of a mass exodus from the gang-ravaged nation, according to a report.

“A wave of violence has engulfed the Caribbean island in recent weeks, leading to concerns over a potential influx of illegal immigration from Haiti …

“Biden administration is considering using [an already existing] migrant center at the US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay as a site to hold people fleeing Haiti’s recent wave of gang violence. The Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo, which is about 200 miles west of Haiti, has been used to house migrants picked up by the US Coast Guard in the Caribbean for more than 30 years.”

The Financial Costs of Illegal Immigration

What are the costs of the Democrats’ cynical political maneuverings, in addition to the division they have created in our political system? At the federal, state, and local levels, U.S. taxpayers currently shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the education, medical, welfare, and law enforcement-related costs associated with the nation’s estimated 12.5 million illegal aliens and their 4.2 million citizen children (who were born in the United States). According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, this “amounts to a tax burden of approximately $8,075 per illegal alien family member.” By contrast, illegal aliens pay only about $19 billion in federal and state income taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, and excise taxes annually, meaning that they represent, on balance, a huge financial drain on the United States.[228]

On September 1, 2021, the Center for Immigration Studies issued a report showing that welfare use by households headed by non-citizens — including legal immigrants, foreign visa workers, green card holders, and illegal aliens — was high relative to native-born Americans. Some key excerpts from the report:

  • “In 2018, 49 percent of households headed by all immigrants — naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants — used at least one major welfare program, compared to 32 percent of households headed by the native-born.”
  • “Among households headed by non-citizens, 55 percent used at least one welfare program.”
  • “Welfare use dropped somewhat to 45 percent for all immigrant households and to 51 percent for non-citizen households if cash payments from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are not counted as welfare. This compares to 28 percent for native households excluding the EITC. EITC recipients pay no federal income tax and, like other welfare, it is a means-tested, anti-poverty program, but unlike other programs one has to work to receive it.”
  • “Compared to native households, immigrant-headed households had especially high use of Medicaid (33 percent vs. 20 percent for natives) and food programs (31 percent vs. 19 percent for natives).”
  • “At 39 percent, non-citizen households’ receipt of both Medicaid and food programs was even higher than for all immigrants and much higher than for the native-born.”
  • “Including the EITC, 25 percent of all immigrant-headed households and 27 percent of non-citizen-headed households received cash welfare, compared to 18 percent of native households.”
  • “Welfare use is high for both newly arrived immigrants and long-time U.S. residents. Of households headed by an immigrant who had lived in the United States for 10 years or less, 44 percent used at least one program. Of those in the country more than 10 years, 50 percent accessed one or more programs.”
  • “Among households headed by a non-citizen who had lived in the United States for 10 years or less, 40 percent used at least one major program and for those in the country more than 10 years it was 62 percent.”
  • “While most new legal immigrants (green card holders) are barred from most welfare programs, as are illegal immigrants and temporary visitors, these restrictions have only a modest impact on immigrant household use rates primarily because non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) can receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children who are awarded U.S. citizenship and full welfare eligibility at birth.”
  • “Other factors that tend to lessen the effectiveness of restrictions on immigrant welfare use include: 1) the bar does not apply to all programs, nor does it always apply to non-citizen children; 2) most legal immigrants have been in the country long enough to qualify for most programs; 3) naturalized citizens have the same welfare eligibility as the native-born; and 4) some states provide welfare to otherwise ineligible immigrants on their own.”
  • “[W]elfare use by immigrants varies significantly by educational attainment, so placing more emphasis on education and skills as selection criteria for prospective immigrants would almost certainly reduce future immigrant welfare use.”

The Crime-Related Costs of Illegal Immigration

Yet another enormous cost that illegal aliens impose on American society shows up in crime statistics:

  • A Fox News analysis of local, state and federal data found that “illegal immigrants are three times as likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population and account for far more crimes than their 3.5-percent share of the U.S. population would suggest.” It is estimated, for instance, that 13.6 percent of the people sentenced for all crimes committed in the United States are illegals. Among these are 12 percent of murderers and 16 percent of drug traffickers. In 2014, illegals accounted for nearly three-fourths of all federal drug sentences and more than one-third of federal sentences overall.[229]
  • Political analyst Peter B. Gemma writes that: (a) “75 percent of those on the most wanted criminals list in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Albuquerque are illegal aliens”; (b) “one quarter of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals, as are more than 40 percent of all inmates in Arizona and 48 percent in New Mexico jails”; and (c) “over 53 percent of all investigated burglaries reported in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas are perpetrated by illegal aliens.”
  • In 2017, the Justice Department reported that of the 188,658 inmates in the federal prison system, 45,493 were foreign-born. Of those, just 3,939 were U.S. citizens. Of the remaining 41,554, immigration orders had been issued for 22,541, or 54.2 percent. Another 13,886 inmates — 33.4 percent — were under investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for possible deportation.
  • A 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated that while illegal aliens comprised about 3.3% of the U.S. population, they accounted for some 21% of all federal prison inmates. “And the actual picture may be worse,” wrote Sharyl Atkisson in The Hill, since the government says it has no way to be notified of all imprisoned illegal immigrants. So, instead, it counts a subset of them that it learns about through identifiers such as an FBI number.” The GAO study found that between 2011-16, there were more than 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. or state prisons and local jails, accounting for 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses. Their offenses included more than 1 million drug crimes, as well as roughly 500,000 assaults, 133,800 sex offenses, 24,200 kidnappings, 33,300 homicide-related events, and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes.
  • Because of its geographic location, the state of Texas is, in the words of The Hill, “an epicenter for illegal immigrant crimes.” An analysis conducted by both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Texas law-enforcement authorities found that between June 2011 and March 2017, more than 217,000 criminal immigrants had been arrested and incarcerated in Texas alone. These perpetrators had jointly committed nearly 600,000 criminal offenses, including almost 1,200 homicides and approximately 69,000 assaults, 17,000 burglaries, 700 kidnappings, 6,200 sexual assaults, 69,000 drug offenses, 8,700 weapons violations, and 3,800 robberies. The DHS confirmed that about two-thirds of these immigrant criminals were in the U.S. illegally at the time of their arrests.[230]

Conclusion

The numbers cited above are staggering. Yet, no matter how stark the evidence that America’s economic and social foundations are buckling under the enormous strains imposed by illegal migration and the abuse of our asylum system, Democrats continue to press for policies that would only amplify the destructive effects of those burdens. They are determined to do everything in their power to overwhelm the nation’s border-security bureaucracy to the point of crisis, which in turn would set the stage for Congress to pass some type of hollow, face-saving “path-to-citizenship” measure that would give the false appearance of doing something to address the problem.

The Democrats’ ultimate objective is a simple one: to import a massive bloc of new voters who will support their party in overwhelming numbers for generations to come, thereby changing forever the economic, cultural, and political landscape of American society. This motive was illuminated with crystal clarity by a 2018 Center for American Progress Action Fund memo in which onetime Hillary Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri called on Democrats to aggressively defend former president Obama’s DACA program,[231] which protected hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from being deported. And why was this so vital to Palmieri? Because those illegals, she explained, represented “a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”[232]

To be sure, there is a strong racial component in this Democrat strategy. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Knowing this, Michelle Goldberg wrote an October 29, 2018 opinion piece in The New York Times titled “We Can Replace Them” — a reference to the white people whom she characterized broadly as “white nationalists.” She ended her piece with these words: “In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.”

In a similar vein, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin said in July 2021: “The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them.”

The Washington Times put it this way in 2019: “With declining support from white and older Americans, the Democrats have concluded that their future lies in importing a new electorate from south of the border.”[233]

It is well established that a significant majority of immigrants to the United States tend, when they become active politically, to support Democrats. All told, approximately 70 percent of Hispanic voters in the U.S. today cast their ballots for Democrats.[234] This is consistent with a Pew Research Center finding that 75 percent of Hispanics in America would prefer a bigger federal government that provides more taxpayer-funded services—a typically Democratic position—as compared to just 41 percent of the overall U.S. population.[235] An important study by University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel confirms that increased levels of immigration at the county level are associated with diminished support for the Republican party in those locales. This occurs, says Gimpel, not only because of Democrat votes cast by immigrants—many of whom are currently non-citizens and thus cannot vote—but also because of outmigration by natives who dislike the cultural and economic changes that immigration often brings.[236]

The orchestrated-crisis strategy that Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven first put forth 55 years ago has gone from being a strategy of political outsiders, to being a keystone of today’s Democratic Party. When they first proposed altering the nature of American society by stressing its key components to the breaking point, Cloward and Piven saw it as a way to persuade the disaffected black “masses” to “deliver their [political] loyalties to their benefactors,”[237] who were mostly Democrats. The goal today is likewise to help Democratic politicians obtain the political loyalty of disaffected minorities, but these minorities are now being imported from other nations.

NOTES:

[1] Brooke Singman, “Psaki Uses ‘Crisis’ to Describe Situation at the Border, Then Walks it BackFox News, March 18, 2021

[2] Karol Markowicz, “Biden’s Illegal-immigration Welcome Mat Caused Disaster at the Border,New York Post, June 13, 2021

[3] Ryan Saavedra, “Biden Border Crisis Sinks To Worst Level In DHS History, Explodes 674% Over Last Year,” Daily Wire, June 9, 2021

[4] Charlotte Cuthbertson, “Border Patrol Apprehends 172,000 Illegal Immigrants in March,” Epoch Times, April 9, 2021

[5] Ibid.

[6] Waitman Wade Beorn, “Yes, You Can Call the Border Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’ but Apply the History with Care,” Washington Post, June 20, 2018

[7] Andrew R. Arthur, “McAleenan Details the Scope of the Disaster at the Border,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 1, 2019

[8] Criminal Noncitizen Statistics Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection

[9] Anna Giaritelli, “More Drugs Seized at Unguarded Sections of the Border than at Ports of Entry in 2018,” Washington Examiner, March 22, 2019

[10] “What Is a Refugee?,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

[11] Jack Crowe, “DHS Secretary: 90 Percent of Recent Asylum-Seekers Skipped Their Hearings,” National Review, June 11, 2019; Jack Davis, “DHS Chief Reveals Large Percentage of Asylum Seekers Disappear, Skip Court Hearings,” Western Journal, June 11, 2019

[12] Cloward-Piven Strategy

[13] Saul Alinsky

[14]  Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” The Nation, March 8, 2010; David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, Nelson Current Publishing Company, 2006, Chapter 6.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.; George Alvin Wiley; Richard Rogin, “Now It’s Welfare Lib,” New York Times, September 27, 1970

[18] Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 111.

[19] James Simpson, “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis,” American Thinker, September 28, 2008; Heather Mac Donald, “Compassion Gone Mad,” City Journal, Winter 1996; Sol Stern, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities,” City Journal, Spring 2003; Michael Tanner and Tad DeHaven, “TANF and Federal Welfare,” Downsizing the Federal Government, September 1, 2010; Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, chapter 6.

[20] Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 111.

[21] Ibid., chapter 7.

[22] Ibid., pp. 119-120.

[23] Ibid., p. 120.

[24] Ibid., pp. 121-122.

[25] Ibid., p. 122.

[26] Michael Falcone and Michael Moss, “Group’s Tally of New Voters Was Vastly Overstated,” New York Times, October 23, 2008

[27] Project Vote; Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education Fund; Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 126.

[28] “The National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” United States Department of Justice

[29] Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 126.

[30]Motor Voter Law Signing Ceremony,” C-SPAN, May 20, 1993

[31] Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, pp. 126-127.

[32]The National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” United States Department of Justice

[33] John Fund, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, Encounter Books, January 1, 2004

[34] Horowitz and Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 127.

[35] Ibid., pp. 127-128.

[36]One in Eight Voter Registrations Inaccurate; 51 Million Citizens Unregistered,” Pew, February 14, 2012; “Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,” Pew, February 14, 2012

[37] Community Reinvestment Act & The Housing Market Crisis of 2008

[38]Fair Lending,” General Accounting Office, August 1996; Vern McKinley, “Community Reinvestment Act,” Cato Institute, October 1994

[39] Raphael W. Bostic, “The Role of Race in Mortgage Lending,” Federal Reserve Board of Governors, December 1996; Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (Basic Books, 1995, pp. 41-42).

[40] Howard Husock, “The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities,” City Journal, Winter 2000

[41] James Simpson, “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis,” American Thinker, September 28, 2008

[42] Katalina M. Bianco, “The Subprime Lending Crisis: Causes and Effects of the Mortgage Meltdown,” CCH, 2008; Shahien Nasiripour, “How Securitization Encouraged Bad Loans,” Huffington Post, November 29, 2009; Thomas Sowell, The Housing Boom and Bust, Basic Books, 2009

[43] Southwest Land Border Encounters FY22, U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Beth Baumann, “Bartiromo’s Interview With Border Patrol Agents Was Interrupted… By Illegal Aliens Crossing the Border,” Townhall, April 28, 2019; Kevin Diaz, “Why a Texas Border Wall Won’t Deter Central American Migrants,” Houston Chronicle, January 17, 2019

[44] “Fact Sheet: U.S. Asylum Process,” International Immigration Forum, January 10, 2019; Asylum Denial Rates Continue to Climb

[45] Beth Baumann, “Bartiromo’s Interview With Border Patrol Agents Was Interrupted… By Illegal Aliens Crossing the Border,” Townhall, April 28, 2019

[46] Ibid.; Kevin Diaz, “Why a Texas Border Wall Won’t Deter Central American Migrants,” Houston Chronicle, January 17, 2019; Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, “U.S. Has Hit ‘Breaking Point’ at Border Amid Immigration Surge, Customs and Border Protection Chief Says,” Washington Post, March 27, 2019

[47] Kate Morrissey, “Border Apprehensions Reached Decade-high in March,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 2019

[48]Timeline of Federal Policy on Immigration, 2017-2020,” Ballotpedia

[49] Congresswoman Norma Torres, “Statement on Immigration Executive Actions,117th Congress in Review, January 26, 2017; Michelle Lujan Grisham, Mike Quigley, “Quigley Introduces Bill to Safeguard Sanctuary Cities,” Vote Smart, January 30, 2017; Juan Vargas, “Rep. Vargas Statement on President Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Executive Orders,” Vote Smart, January 25, 2017

[50] Gwen Moore, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Rick Larsen, “Letter to Donald Trump, President of the United States – Urging Trump Administration to Rescind Executive Order Directing Federal Government to Withhold Federal Funds from Sanctuary Cities,” Vote Smart, March 15, 2017; “H.R. 3003: No Sanctuary for Criminals Act,” GovTrack, June 29, 2017; “H.R.748 – Safeguarding Sanctuary Cities Act of 2017,” Congress.Gov, 115th Congress (2017-2018)

[51] Darren Soto, “Congressman Soto Speaks Out Against Border Wall Funding,” soto.house.gov, July 28, 2017; Salud Carbajal, “Rep. Carbajal Statement on Trump’s Border Wall Executive Action,” Vote Smart, January 25, 2017; Vicente Gonzalez, “Congressman Gonzalez Speaks on House Floor in Opposition to Border Wall Funding,” gonzalez.house.gov, July 27, 2017

[52] Sarah A. Harvard, “Donald Trump Didn’t Come Up with the List of Muslim countries He Wants to Ban. Obama Did,” MIC, January 27, 2017

[53] Dan Merica, “Trump Signs Executive Order to Keep Out ‘Radical Islamic Terrorists’,” CNN, January 30, 2017

[54] Georgett Roberts, Jennifer Bain, Kathianne Boniello, “Federal Judge Grants Stay for Those Detained Under Trump’s Travel Ban,” New York Post, January 28, 2017

[55] James Robart, Ballotpedia

[56] Matt Ford, “Federal Judges Refuse to Reinstate Trump’s Immigration Ban,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2017

[57] David Weigel, Ed O’Keefe, “Democrats Join Protests against Trump Order, Vow Bill to Block Travel Ban,” Chicago Tribune, January 29, 2017

[58] Jordain Carney, “Schumer Wants Details on ‘Disturbing’ Trump Immigration Raids,” The Hill, February 13, 2017

[59] Tal Kopan, “Democrats, Advocates Question ICE Raids after Hundreds of Arrests,” CNN, February 14, 2017

[60] Timeline of Federal Policy on Immigration, 2017-2020Ballotpedia

[61] Ibid.

[62] Congresswoman Norma Torres, “Rep. Torres on Trump’s Decision to End DACA,” 117th Congress in Review, September 5, 2017

[63] Albia Sires, “Congressman Sires’ Statement on President Trump’s Decision to Terminate DACA,” sires.house.gov, September 5, 2017

[64] Salud Carbajal, “Rep. Carbajal Statement on Trump Administration Termination of DACA,” carbajal.house.gov, September 5, 2017

[65] Adriano Espaillat, “Congressman Adriano Espaillat, Congressional Leaders Hold Moment of Truth Forum on Next Steps on Immigration in America,” espaillat.house.gov, September 20, 2017

[66] Kate Morrissey, “Border Apprehensions Reached Decade-High in March,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 2019

[67] Ibid.

[68]Attorney General Announces Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry,” United States Department of Justice, April 6, 2018; Charlie Savage “Explaining Trump’s Executive Order on Family Separation,” New York Times, June 20, 2018

[69] Jessica Corbett, “‘Unethical, Ineffective, and Inhumane’: Democrats Demand End to Trump’s Family Separation Policy,” Common Dreams, June 7, 2018; Jesse Byrnes, “Biden Rips Trump Immigration Policy: ‘One of the Darkest Moments in Our History’,” The Hill, July 21, 2018; Aris Folley, “Bernie Sanders Calls for Trump’s ‘Disastrous’ Immigration Policy to Be ‘Abolished’,” The Hill, June 27, 2018; Veronica Stracqualursi, “Sen. Warren: Replace ICE with ‘Something that Reflects Our Morality’,” CNN, June 30, 2018

[70] Pramila, Jayapal, “Jayapal, Thompson and Lofgren Lead 108 Lawmakers Urging Appropriators to Stop DHS from Separating Families,” jayapal.house.gov, June 7, 2018

[71] TIME Staff, “The Story Behind TIME’s Trump ‘Welcome to America’ Cover,” TIME, June 21, 2018

[72] Emily Tillett, “Sen. Susan Collins: Trump Administration Policy of Separating Families “Traumatizing” Children,” CBS News, June 17, 2018

[73] Nancy Cordes, Rebecca Kaplan and Emily Tillett, “Speaker Paul Ryan Not Comfortable with Separating Families at U.S. Border,” CBS News, June 14, 2018

[74] Luis Sanchez, “Jeb Bush: Trump Should End ‘Heartless’ Policy Separating Migrant Families,The Hill, June 18, 2018

[75] Andrew R. Arthur, “McAleenan Details the Scope of the Disaster at the Border,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 1, 2019; Anna Giaritelli, “DNA Tests Reveal 30% of Suspected Fraudulent Migrant Families Were Unrelated,” Washington Examiner, May 18, 2019

[76] Matt Sussis, “The History of the Flores Settlement,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 11, 2019

[77] Ibid.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Ibid. (Note: In 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court reaffirmed that Flores applied to all children, whether or not they were accompanied by an adult.)

[81] Kate Morrissey, “Border Apprehensions Reached Decade-High in March,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 2019

[82] Adam Edelman, “Trump Signs Order Stopping His Policy of Separating Families at Border,” NBC News, June 20, 2018

[83]Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act Urgently Needed for Humane Treatment of Detainees,” Southern Poverty Law Center, October 3, 2017

[84] Richard Gonzales, “Trump’s Executive Order On Family Separation: What It Does And Doesn’t Do,” npr, June 20, 2018

[85] Nancy Pelosi, “Pelosi Statement on Trump’s Family Detention Plan,” speaker.gov, June 20, 2018

[86] Miriam Jordan, “More Migrants Are Crossing the Border This Year. What’s Changed?,New York Times, March 5, 2019

[87] Ibid.

[88] Nick Miroff, “Family Migration, Already at Record Levels, Rocketed to New High in February,” Washington Post, March 5, 2019

[89] Caitlin Dickerson, “Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More Than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month,” New York Times, March 5, 2019

[90] Kate Morrissey, “Border Apprehensions Reached Decade-high in March,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 2019

[91] Daniella Diaz, “These Democrats Want to Abolish ICE,” CNN, July 3, 2018

[92] Sophie Tatum, “Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Calls for End of ICE,” CNN, June 28, 2018

[93] Gregory Krieg, “The Movement to ‘Abolish ICE’ Is Heating Up – And Going Mainstream,” CNN, July 2, 2018

[94] Marc Pocan, “Following Trip to Southern Border, Pocan to Introduce Legislation that Would Abolish ICE,” pocan.house.gov, June 25, 2018

[95] Earl Blumenauer, “Congressman Blumenauer to Introduce Legislation to Abolish ICE,” blumenauer.house.gov, June 28, 2018

[96] Pueblo Sin Fronteras

[97] “Solidarity With Migrant Caravan (And NO to Repression),” Pueblo Sin Fronteras, October 21, 2018

[98] “Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020; “Total Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 Years Old) Apprehensions By Month – FY 2010- 2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020; “Total Family Unit* Apprehensions By Month – FY 2013-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[99] Mark Krikorian, “Democrats and Open Borders: The Budget Is the Policy,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 11, 2019

[100] Andrew R. Arthur, “McAleenan Details the Scope of the Disaster at the Border,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 1, 2019; Anna Giaritelli, “DNA Tests Reveal 30% of Suspected Fraudulent Migrant Families Were Unrelated,” Washington Examiner, May 18, 2019

[101] Jim Clifton, “What If There Were 42 Million at the Border?,” Gallup, February 8, 2019

[102] “Full Transcripts: Trump’s Speech on Immigration and the Democratic Response,” New York Times, January 8, 2019

[103] “Pelosi and Schumer’s Response to Trump’s Border Speech,” NBC, January 8, 2019

[104] Ibid.

[105] “Sanders’ Prepared Remarks in Response to Trump’s Oval Office Address,” sanders.senate.gov, January 8, 2019

[106]Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[107]Total Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 Years Old) Apprehensions By Month – FY 2010- 2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[108]Total Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 Years Old) Apprehensions By Month – FY 2010- 2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[109]Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[110]Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[111]Total Family Unit* Apprehensions By Month – FY 2013-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[112] Colleen Long, “Migrants Cross Border in Record Numbers, Put System at ‘Breaking Point’,” Detroit News, March 5, 2019

[113]Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[114]Total Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 Years Old) Apprehensions By Month – FY 2010- 2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[115]Total Family Unit* Apprehensions By Month – FY 2013-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[116] Andrew R. Arthur, “Latest Border Numbers Show Worsening Crisis,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 13, 2019

[117]Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month – FY 2000-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[118]Total Unaccompanied Alien Children (0-17 Years Old) Apprehensions By Month – FY 2010- 2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[119]Total Family Unit* Apprehensions By Month – FY 2013-2019,” United States Border Patrol, 2020

[120] Bob Price, “Migrant Apprehensions So Far This Year Exceed Total Years for Last Decade,” Breitbart, June 5, 2019

[121] Thomas Lifson, “Why All 10 Dems Raised Their Hands Last Night in Support of Unpopular Free Medical Care for Illegals,” American Thinker, June 28, 2019

[122] “Migrant Protection Protocols,” Homeland Security, January 24, 2019; “Mexico Says it Will Stop Hundreds of Migrants Trying to Reach US,BBC, January 16, 2020

[123] Neil Munro, “Trump Deal with Mexico Likely Ends Catch-and-Release, Defunds Cartels,” Breitbart, June 7, 2019

[124] Sonia Pérez D., “Dissolved Migrant Caravan Sign of Tougher Guatemala Stance,” AP, October 5, 2020

[125] Bill Chappell, “Trump Administration Implementing ‘Safe 3rd Country’ Rule On Migrants Seeking Asylum,” npr, July 15, 2019; Ronn Blitzer, “Trump Administration Announces Major Crackdown on Asylum Seekers,” Fox News, July 15, 2019

[126] Julián Aguilar, “Most Migrants Won’t Qualify for U.S. Asylum Under New Trump Policy,” Texas Tribune, July 15, 2019

[127] Ronn Blitzer, “Trump Administration Announces Major Crackdown on Asylum Seekers,” Fox News, July 15, 2019; Susan Jones, “Dems Won’t Curb Illegal Immigration, But They Plan to Pass a Resolution Condemning Trump,” cnsnews, July 16, 2019

[128] Jason Hopkins, “Trump Administration Signs Asylum Deal with Honduras,” Daily Signal, September 26, 2019

[129] “DACA,” Politico, November 21, 2019; John Binder, “Joe Biden Vows Amnesty for All Illegal Aliens in First 100 Days: ‘We Owe Them’,” Breitbart, October 22, 2020

[130] “Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

[131] Luis Miranda, “Get the Facts on the DREAM Act,” obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, December 1, 2010; “The Dream Act: An Overview,” American Immigration Council, March 16, 2021

[132] Jonathan Petts, “All About the DREAM Act 2021,” ImmigrationHelp.org, November 22, 2022

[133]Joe Biden Vows Amnesty for All Illegal Aliens in First 100 Days: ‘We Owe Them’,” Breitbart, October 22, 2020

[134] PTI Washington, “President Joe Biden Sends Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill to Congress on Day One in White House,” Deccan Herald, January 21, 2021

[135] “Preserving and Fortifying Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” whitehouse.gov, January 20, 2021

[136] Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Mexicans Decline to Less than Half the U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population for the First Time,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2019

[137] Eliza Willis and Janet A. Seiz, “All Latinos Don’t Vote the Same Way – Their Place of Origin Matters,” The Conversation, March 17, 2020

[138] Eileen Patten and Mark Hugo Lozez, “Are Unauthorized Immigrants Overwhelmingly Democrats?,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2013

[139] “Party Platform: The Democratic Platform,” Democratic National Committee

[140] Susan Jones, “Biden Would Immediately End All Deportations, Except for Felons,” cnsnews, March 16, 2020

[141]Proclamation on the Termination of Emergency with Respect to the Southern Border of the United States and Redirection of Funds Diverted to Border Wall Construction,” whitehouse.gov, January 20, 2021

[142] Caitlin Emma and Connor O’Brien, “Biden Scuttles Trump’s Dreams for Border Wall Cash,” Politico, April 11, 2021

[143]Party Platform: The Democratic Platform,” Democratic National Committee

[144] “Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border,” whitehouse.gov, February 2, 2021

[145] Todd Bensman, “‘Catch and Release’ Resumes on Texas Border in the Face of Rising Migrant Numbers,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 3, 2021

[146] Secretary Antony Blinken, “We Will Deliver on @POTUS’s Vision of Safe, Orderly, and Humane Regional Migration,” twitter.com, February 6, 2021; Nick Miroff, “At the Border, a Widely Predicted Crisis that Caught Biden Off Guard,” Washington Post, April 26, 2021

[147] “Biden Begins Dismantling Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Asylum Policy,” Newsmax, February 12, 2021; Andrew R. Arthur, “‘Remain in Mexico’ Remains in Place — For Now,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 21, 2021

[148] Kenneth Garger, “Border Agents Releasing Asylum-seeking Migrants into US Without Court Date,” New York Post, March 22, 2021

[149] Randy Clark, “Biden Begins Immediate Catch-and-Release of Migrant Families Without Issuing Court Dates,” Breitbart, March 21, 2021

[150] Emily Brooks, “Biden: Trump Travel Ban ‘Like Putting Up a Great Big Recruiting Banner for Terrorists’,” Washington Examiner,  January 24, 2020

[151] Barnini Chakraborty, “Trump Signs Executive Order for ‘Extreme Vetting’ of Refugees,” Fox News, January 27, 2017

[152] Sarah A. Harvard, “Donald Trump Didn’t Come Up with the List of Muslim countries He Wants to Ban. Obama Did,” MIC, January 27, 2017

[153]Party Platform: The Democratic Platform,” Democratic National Committee

[154] Emily Brooks, “Biden: Trump Travel Ban ‘Like Putting Up a Great Big Recruiting Banner for Terrorists’,” Washington Examiner,  January 24, 2020

[155] Anchal Vohra, “Biden Rescinds Trump’s Muslim Ban, Pledges to Accept More Refugees,” Observer Research Foundation, February 7, 2021

[156] “Proclamation on Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to the United States,” whitehouse.gov, January 20, 2021

[157] Seth Barron, “Is There Anything New York Won’t Do for Immigrants?,” New York Post, October 24, 2019

[158] Robert Law, “President Biden’s First 100 Days: Swift Action to Change Immigration Policy,” Center for Immigration Studies, April 27, 2021

[159] “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations,” joebiden.com, August 2020

[160] Philip A.S. Shepherd, “Biden Administration Abandons Trump-Era Public Charge Rule,” National Law Review, March 23, 2021

[161] Tucker Carlson, “Tucker Carlson: Under Biden, You Need a Negative COVID Test to Enter US — Unless You’re an Illegal Alien,” Fox News, February 8, 2021; “CDC Expands Negative COVID-19 Test Requirement to All Air Passengers Entering the United States,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 12, 2021

[162] Joe Biden, “Wearing a Mask Isn’t a Political Statement — it’s a Patriotic Duty.” twitter.com, November 19, 2020

[163] Tucker Carlson, “Tucker Carlson: Under Biden, You Need a Negative COVID Test to Enter US — Unless You’re an Illegal Alien,” Fox News, February 8, 2021

[164] “A Proclamation on Revoking Proclamation 10014,” whitehouse.gov, February 24, 2021

[165] Samuel Allegri, “Up to 50 Percent of Illegal Immigrants Estimated to Have COVID-19: National Sheriff’s Association,” Epoch Times, March 18, 2021

[166] Brandon Mulder, “Is the Surge of Migrant Children Arriving at Border a Result of Biden Policies?,” Austin American-Statesman, March 29, 2021

[167] Robert Law, “President Biden’s First 100 Days: Swift Action to Change Immigration Policy,” Center for Immigration Studies, April 27, 2021

[168] John Binder, “Joe Biden May End Remaining Border Controls Next Month,” Breitbart, 24 Jun 2021

[169] Joseph Simonson, “Biden Hollows Out Trump-Era COVID Protections at the Border,” Washington Free Beacon, May 20, 2021

[170] Jazz Shaw, “Biden Quietly Rolls Back Border COVID Protections,” Hot Air, May 20, 2021

[171] Mike Allen, “1 Big Thing: Biden’s Major Border Shake-up,” Axios, June 23, 2021

[172] “The Difference between Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Migrants,” Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, January 8, 2021

[173]Party Platform: The Democratic Platform,” Democratic National Committee

[174] “Executive Order on Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration,” whitehouse.gov, February 4, 2021

[175] Jens Manuel Krogstad and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “Key Facts about U.S. Immigration Policies and Biden’s Proposed Changes,” Pew Research Center, January 11, 2022

[176] Ibid.

[177] Michelle Malkin, “Biden’s Ruinous Refugee Dump,” cnsnews, May 5, 2021

[178] Ibid.

[179] Abby Budiman, Luis Noe-Bustamante and Mark Hugo Lopez, “Naturalized Citizens Make Up Record One-in-Ten U.S. Eligible Voters in 2020,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2020

[180] John Binder, “Joe Biden Vows Flood of Immigration If Elected,Breitbart, August 9, 2019

[181] Mark D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs “Biden Aims to Rebuild and Expand Legal Immigration,” New York Times, May 31, 2021

[182] Masooma Hag “Biden Administration Announces Campaign to Make it Easier for Millions of Immigrants to Becomes Citizens,” Epoch Times, July 3, 2021; “Executive Order on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans,” whitehouse.gov, February 2, 2021

[183]March Democratic Debate Transcript: Joe Biden & Bernie Sanders,” @rev, March 16, 2020

[184] Neil Munro, “Joe Biden Promises Sanctuary for Drunk-Driving Illegals,” Breitbart, January 21, 2020

[185] “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fiscal Year 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations Report,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2019

[186] Susan Jones, “Biden Would Immediately End All Deportations, Except for Felons,” cnsnews, March 16, 2020

[187] “Executive Order on the Revision of Civil Immigration Enforcement Policies and Priorities,” whitehouse.gov, January 20, 2021; Ronald W. Mortensen, “President Trump’s Executive Order Puts Americans First; at Least 75% of Illegal Aliens Eligible for Deportation,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 6, 2017

[188] John Binder, “Confusion at ICE over “Release Them All” Email,” Breitbart, January 23, 2021

[189] Sabrina Rodriguez, “Biden Dealt Blow on 100-day Deportation Moratorium,” Politico, January 26, 2021

[190] David Krayden, “‘People Will Die. People Will Be Raped’: Former Acting ICE Chief Says Biden Has Declared America ‘A Sanctuary Jurisdiction’,” Daily Caller, February 10, 2021

[191] Human Events Staff, “Biden Cancels Trump’s ‘Operation Talon’ Program that Targeted Sex Offenders Living in U.S. Illegally,” Human Events, February 26, 2021

[192] Andrew Cline, “AG Wilson Urges Biden to Reverse Cancellation of ICE Operation on Convicted Sex Offenders,” abc News, February 19, 2021

[193] John Binder, “Joe Biden Expands ‘Sanctuary Country’ Orders, Gives Illegal Aliens Another Route to Avoid Arrest,” Breitbart, March 5, 2021; John Binder, “Biden Restrictions on ICE Agents to Devastate U.S. Border Towns,” Breitbart, February 14, 2021

[194] John Binder, “Biden Throws Out Trump Reform, Gives ‘De Facto Amnesty’ to Illegal Aliens Ordered Deported,” Breitbart, May 8, 2021

[195] “Employment Authorization for Certain Classes of Aliens with Final Orders of Removal; Withdrawal,” Department of Homeland Security, May 10, 2021

[196] Paul Bedard, “Jail Survey: 7 in 10 Felons Register as Democrats,” Washington Examiner, January 1, 2014

[197]Party Platform: The Democratic Platform,” Democratic National Committee

[198] Roy Maurer, “Biden Vows to Roll Back Trump’s Immigration Policies,” Society for Human Resource Management, November 18, 2020; Maria Sacchetti, “Biden Sees Obama’s Mass Deportations as a “Big Mistake,’ Plans to Pause Expulsions,” Washington Post, February 12, 2020

[199] Jorge Loweree and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “Tracking the Biden Agenda on Immigration Enforcement,” American Immigration Council, May 20, 2021

[200] Paul Sacca, “Biden’s DHS Secretary: If ‘Loving Parents’ Send Children to Border, ‘We Will Not Expel’ Them, ‘We Will Care for Them,’” Blaze Media, March 19, 2021

[201] Ibid.; Chris Pandolfo, “DHS Secretary Says Border Surge Is ‘Difficult.’ Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin Calls it a ‘Crisis’,” Blaze Media, March 16, 2021

[202] Paul Sacca, “Border Crisis: Migrant Facility at 729% Capacity, Children Take Turns Sleeping on the Floor, No Showers for Days,” Blaze Media, March 13, 2021

[203] Phil Shiver, “Border Crisis: Record Number of Migrant Children Being Held in ‘Grim’ Cage-like ‘Cells’ for Longer Than Is Legal,” March 11, 2021

[204] “Timeline of Federal Policy on Immigration, 2017-2020,” Ballotpedia; Some sanctuary policies are “formal,” in the sense that they are embodied in laws passed by local governments requiring city employees to refrain from notifying the federal government that illegal aliens are living in their communities. Other sanctuary policies are “informal” — not codified anywhere in written form, but nonetheless carried out by local government workers.

[205] Juan Vargas, “Rep. Vargas Statement on President Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Executive Orders,” Vote Smart, January 25, 2017

[206] Joe Biden, “Joe Biden’s Policies on Immigration Issues,” ISideWith…

[207] Sarah N. Lynch, “U.S. Justice Department Ends Trump-era Limits on Grants to ‘Sanctuary Cities’,” Reuters, April 28, 2021

[208] Tom Ozimek, “Supreme Court Dismisses ‘Sanctuary City’ Cases at Request of Biden’s DOJ,” Epoch Times, March 5, 2021

[209] Sarah N. Lynch, “U.S. Justice Department Ends Trump-era Limits on Grants to ‘Sanctuary Cities’,” Reuters, April 28, 2021

[210] “Biden’s 2019 ‘Surge To The Border’ Comments Resurface Amid Growing Crisis,” Daily Wire, March 18, 2021

[211] Karol Markowicz, “Biden’s Illegal-Immigration Welcome Mat Caused Disaster at the Border,” New York Post, June 13, 2021

[212] Todd Bensman, “Overwhelmed Mexican Alien-Smuggling Cartels Use Wristband System to Bring Order to Business,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2, 2021; Todd Bensman, “Migrants Chanting ‘Biden! Biden!’ Attempt to Rush Border,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 4, 2021

[213] Charlotte Cuthbertson, “Majority of Families Crossing Border Are Released Into United States,” Epoch Times, March 29, 2021

[214] Phil Shiver, “Border Crisis: Record Number of Migrant Children Being Held in ‘Grim’ Cage-like ‘Cells’ for Longer Than Is Legal,” March 11, 2021; Nick Miroff, “At Border, Record Number of Migrant Youths Wait in Adult Detention Cells for Longer than Legally Allowed,” Washington Post, March 10, 2021

[215] Charlotte Cuthbertson, “Border Agent Gives Inside Account of Overcrowded Facilities,” Epoch Times, March 23, 2021

[216] Phil Shiver, “Border Crisis: Record Number of Migrant Children Being Held in ‘Grim’ Cage-like ‘Cells’ for Longer Than Is Legal,” March 11, 2021; Nick Miroff, “At Border, Record Number of Migrant Youths Wait in Adult Detention Cells for Longer than Legally Allowed,” Washington Post, March 10, 2021

[217] Ibid.

[218] Ibid.

[219] Ibid.

[220] Ibid.

[221] Charlotte Cuthbertson, “Human Trafficking, Sexual Assaults Key Aspects on Southern Border,” Epoch Times, January 13, 2019

[222] Yael Halon, “Biden Border Policies Enrich Drug Cartels Charging $6G to Smuggle Migrants into US: Arizona Sheriff,” Fox News, March 15, 2021

[223] Karol Markowicz, “Biden’s Illegal-immigration Welcome Mat Caused Disaster at the Border,New York Post, June 13, 2021

[224] Ryan Saavedra, “Biden Border Crisis Sinks To Worst Level In DHS History, Explodes 674% Over Last Year,” Daily Wire, June 9, 2021; “Southwest Land Border Encounters,U.S. Customs and Border Protection

[225] Charlotte Cuthbertson, “Southwest Land Border Encounters,U.S. Customs and Border Protection; “Border Patrol Apprehends 172,000 Illegal Immigrants in March,” Epoch Times, April 8, 2021

[226] Karol Markowicz, “Biden’s Illegal-immigration Welcome Mat Caused Disaster at the Border,New York Post, June 13, 2021

[227] Adam Shaw, “Migrant Arrests at Southern Border Rose Yet Again in June to 188,000, Topping 1M This Fiscal Year,” Fox News, July 16, 2021; Paul Bedard, “Nearly 190,000 Border Crossings Seen in June, Busts Biden’s Claim It’s Seasonal,” Washington Examiner, July 14, 2021

[228] Matt O’Brien and Spencer Raley, “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers,” Federation for American Immigration Reform, September 27, 2017

[229] Aaron Bandler, “9 Things You Need to Know About Illegal Immigration and Crime,” Daily Wire, October 22, 2016; Pete Kasperowicz, “Illegal Immigrants Responsible for Almost Three-Fourths of Federal Drug Possession Sentences in 2014,” Washington Examiner, July 8, 2015

[230] Ron Martinelli, “The Truth about Crime, Illegal Immigrants and Sanctuary Cities,” The Hill, April 19, 2017; Frank V. Vernuccio, Jr. “Obama Illegal Alien Crime Policy Reversed, Part 2,” USA Gov Policy, April 29, 2017

[231] Mark Krikorian, “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)” Center for Immigration Studies

[232] Ford O’Connell, “Democrats: The Party of Illegal Immigration,” The Hill, February 4, 2019

[233] Editorial, “The Shutdown Revealed Democrats’ Scheme to Import a Radical New Electorate,” Washington Times, January 28, 2019

[234] Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’,” New York Times, April 3, 2019

[235] Paul Taylor Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Martínez and Gabriel Velaxco, “V. Politics, Values and Religion,” Pew Research Center, April 4, 2012

[236] James G. Gimpel, “Immigration’s Impact on Republican Political Prospects, 1980 to 2012,” Center for Immigration Studies, April 15, 2014; Jason Richwine, “More Immigration Would Mean More Democrats,” National Review, October 3, 2017

[237] Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” The Nation, March 8, 2010

  • This essay was authored by John Perazzo and first published by Discover The Networks in 2021.

Additional Resources:


Crashing The Border: The Left’s Manufactured Crisis (pamphlet)
By John Perazzo
September 2021

Unaccompanied Alien Children and the Crisis at the Border
By The Center for Immigration Studies
April 1, 2019

The History of the Flores Settlement
By The Center for Immigration Studies
February 11, 2019

Fake Family Units at the Border
By The Center for Immigration Studies
February 15, 2019

An Incredibly Violent Journey to the United States
By The Center for Immigration Studies
October 25, 2018

Family Unit Apprehensions Soared in FY 2018
By The Center for Immigration Studies
October 24, 2018

Video:

The Crisis at Our Southern Border
By Mark Morgan
August 11, 2021

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