When Joe Biden visited the border in El Paso recently, his team spun the narrative of a decisive leader tackling the problems he inherited upon taking office. The reality could not be more different. Biden inherited a very stable border, which has gotten progressively worse on his watch. Unless drastic changes are made, the worst is still to come.
In the final month of 2022, more than 220,000 illegal aliens were apprehended at the U.S. border. This was a record for the month of December, which came despite historically low temperatures during the holiday season. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was lambasted as cruel by the White House and the corporate media for sending some of these illegal aliens to Washington, D.C., but the real cruelty is coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It’s hard to think of anything more reckless and cruel than policies which entice migrants to make a treacherous journey in freezing temperatures, and then demands they sleep on cold cement. That’s exactly what the Biden Administration has done, and it has overwhelmed more than just border states at this point.
New York Mayor Eric Adams called America’s abandoned border an “embarrassment” earlier this month, and said that New York City has “no more room at the inn,” despite branding itself as a sanctuary city. Meanwhile, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a longtime champion of anti-border policies, recently announced that the state had been bussing illegal aliens out of the state for weeks and planned to bus illegal aliens to New York City. Polis has mysteriously escaped the condemnation that Govs. Abbott and Ron DeSantis of Florida received from the corporate media, but his and Adams’ actions demonstrate that Joe Biden’s border crisis is reaching a major tipping point. When even America’s most lawless sanctuary city is throwing up its hands, that demonstrates just how out of control the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border has become.
The main reason the crisis has become so bad is because the Biden Administration refuses to do its duty and enforce U.S. immigration law. During fiscal year 2022, which ranged from October 1, 2021 until September 30, 2022, the Biden Administration deported just 72,000 people, despite millions of illegal aliens entering the country during that time period. This is a historically low number, just up from the first fiscal year of the Biden Administration, when 59,000 illegal aliens were deported.
Currently, more than 1.2 million illegal aliens who have final removal orders are still living in the country, and there is no indication of any sense of urgency from the federal government to deport them. When a population of illegal alien fugitives larger than several states is living in the country that is indicative of a major breakdown in the rule of law.
This breakdown in the rule of law has had deadly consequences for the American people. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently announced the seizure of enough fentanyl to kill every single American in 2022. New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that over 110,000 Americans overdosed on drugs from March 2021 to March 2022, largely driven by fentanyl. These tragic numbers will only increase in the coming years as drug cartels continue to seize operational control of the U.S.-Mexico border. Given that the vast majority of fentanyl comes to the U.S. through the southern border, it’s fair to estimate that the federal government could save tens of thousands of American lives by simply regaining control of the border. The fact that they choose not to is yet another demonstration of how apathetic U.S. government officials are towards the lives of the people they are supposed to represent.
Early in his presidency, Biden tasked Kamala Harris with identifying the “root causes” of illegal immigration, but the root cause of the current crisis is pretty obvious. The main reason for the unprecedented crisis currently unfolding at the border is the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce the law and deport people in the country illegally. Illegal aliens know that if they can get into the country, they will most likely never be forced to leave. This administration has created clear incentives for illegal aliens to breach our border, and until those incentives are revoked, the crisis will only get worse.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
