During her press briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the administration is making every effort to address the ongoing surge of migrants at the southwest border.
However, this is not true, and Jean-Pierre is well aware of it: President Biden is not fulfilling the one requirement mandated by the law – detaining illegal entrants.
The reason these migrants are coming is because they know Biden will release them, allowing them to stay and work in the country indefinitely.
The law is clear-cut, stating that the Department of Homeland Security must detain all inadmissible “applicants for admission” (including border crossers) until they are either granted asylum or removed.
Since day one, Biden has ignored this congressional mandate.
What’s worse is that even as the number of apprehensions at the US-Mexico border reaches new records, Biden has requested Congress to reduce funding for alien detention beds in the past two fiscal years.
Last year, Congress refused to comply, and it remains to be seen how they will respond this year.
From the beginning, Biden has disregarded the clear connection between his migrant-release policies and the border crisis. In a March 2021 press conference, he insisted that “Nothing has changed” at the border under his administration compared to Donald Trump’s.
He dismissed the then-emerging surge as typical, claiming that “It happens every single, solitary year.” This shows either ignorance, indifference, or misdirection, and possibly a combination of all three.
The administration continues to argue that the migrant surge is driven by “hemispheric conditions” such as “food insecurity” and “climate change,” even after a federal judge in March stated that while these “geopolitical factors” have contributed to the surge, officials’ claims that the border crisis is not largely their own doing due to lenient detention policies are divorced from reality.
To put it in the words of Chico Marx: “Who ya gonna believe – Jean-Pierre or your own eyes?”
Even worse, Jean-Pierre attempts to shift the blame for the crisis onto congressional Republicans, citing their refusal to consider Biden’s proposed “comprehensive piece of legislation” to fix what she describes as a “broken immigration system.”
However, this proposal is nothing more than a massive amnesty for nearly all illegal aliens in the country, and it would even allow those deported under Trump to reenter.
Even the Democrats who controlled Congress during Biden’s first two years rejected the proposal. If an amnesty is too extreme for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, then it must be truly problematic.
Furthermore, the purportedly “broken” immigration system worked effectively for decades before Biden took office.
The backlog of asylum cases in immigration courts has increased by over a third since Trump’s final full fiscal year, and it would be even worse if Biden’s DHS hadn’t deliberately dismissed nearly 92,000 cases in FY 2022.
If Biden truly cared about the border disaster he created, he would be collaborating with congressional Republicans to find a solution, instead of sending his press secretary to spread falsehoods and deflect blame.
However, most of the media continue to uncritically report the White House’s narrative to their audiences.
Evidently, both the media and the administration are content with the situation at the border, with millions of illegal entrants already released into the country and thousands more arriving every day.
Andrew Arthur is the resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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