OPINION:
If the most abject failure of the first year of the Biden administration was its haphazard pullout from Afghanistan — leaving behind an unknown number of Americans at the tender mercies of the Taliban, while at the same time gifting them with tens of billions of dollars of military weapons, vehicles and aircraft likewise left behind — President Biden’s second-biggest policy disaster has to be the tsunami of illegal immigrants pouring all but unchecked across our southern border.
While it would be nearly impossible — even for this administration — to make the debacle in Afghanistan worse, it is striving mightily to exacerbate the untenable situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Dec. 29, the Biden administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow it to scrap the Trump administration’s sensible “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring would-be immigrants to stay on the other side of the Rio Grande while awaiting adjudication of their asylum claims.
Two lower courts have already told the administration “no.” The Supreme Court should not only not accept the case for a full hearing but turn the appeal down cold: Not just no. Hell, no.
Our national sovereignty deserves no less.
According to Customs and Borders Protection figures released Jan. 3, “Overall, in [fiscal year] 2021, there were 1.72 million CBP encounters [with illegal immigrants] that resulted in either expulsion under the [Centers for Disease Control’s] Title 42 public health authority or processing as Title 8 immigration enforcement cases. …”
“The Department completed 1.2 million repatriations, including expulsions under Title 42 and removals under Title 8, which represents a 15-year high that is more than two-and-a-half times as many repatriations as in FY 2020.” (Fiscal 2020 was the last full fiscal year of Donald Trump’s presidency.)
With those kinds of numbers, there’s no good reason to do away with the Remain in Mexico program — formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, first implemented in early 2019 — and hundreds of thousands of reasons every month not to.
Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department last week urged the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that required this open-borders administration to revive the Remain in Mexico program.
Last Feb. 2, less than two weeks after taking office, Mr. Biden called for a pro forma review of the Migrant Protection Protocols — as a predicate for rescinding it, which Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas happily obliged on June 1. But a successful lawsuit by Texas and Missouri forced its resumption.
A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit of Appeals ruled Dec. 13 that the federal government is legally required to return illegal immigrants to Mexico when the feds don’t have the capacity to detain them — rather than just allowing them to proceed to travel to the interior of the country, most of them never to be heard from again.
“If allowed to stand, that decision will continue to severely impair the Executive Branch’s constitutional and statutory authority to manage the border and conduct the nation’s foreign policy,” the Justice Department’s Dec. 29 appeal to the high court risibly claimed.
“Manage the border”? Seriously? That’s precisely what the Biden administration isn’t doing, as the record spike in illegal immigration makes undeniably clear. It’s not at all funny, but the justices should laugh this appeal out of court.
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