OPINION:
When Donald Trump left office, we had restored operational control of our southern border. The wall was nearing completion. Court ordered deportations were finally being enforced. The Migrant Protection Protocols negotiated with Mexico had reduced the number of fraudulent asylum claims to a trickle.
All that Biden needed to do was to continue these policies. Instead, he reversed them on his first day in office. He ordered the border wall to be abandoned, leaving construction gaps that make it useless. He ordered ICE to cease enforcing the law. He ended Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy. And he sent a clear and unmistakable message heard around the world: America is now a nation without borders.
The numbers are staggering. In 20 months, nearly one and a half million illegal migrants have been deliberately admitted into our country and trafficked throughout it at taxpayer expense. While the border patrol was overwhelmed processing this illegal mass migration, another one million or more entered without ever encountering the border patrol.
In other words, the Biden administration has added an illegal population the size of Delaware, Vermont and South Dakota COMBINED. No civilization has survived a mass migration of this magnitude. Gallup reports there are 42 million people living in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean who want to come to the United States. And they are.
How are our schools made better by packing classrooms with non-English speaking students? How are our hospitals made more accessible by overwhelming emergency rooms with illegals demanding care? How is the social safety net for Americans strengthened by admitting millions of impoverished dependents? How are our communities made safer by refusing to deport criminal aliens? How are working families’ wages improved by flooding the labor market with desperate illegal labor?
How are the migrants helped by placing themselves and their children into the hands of criminal cartels? How are they aided by being encouraged to undertake the treacherous trip that has killed over 750 migrants so far this year? How are migrant children protected by placing them in the hands of criminal cartels and releasing them in the United States with no follow-up as to their welfare? How are legitimate asylum claimants helped by swamping the system with fraudulent claims? How are legal immigrants helped by the proliferation of violent gangs in their neighborhoods?
Two things should be obvious. First, this is a deliberate policy by this administration. On a recent border trip to the Yuma sector, rank and file border patrol officers told me that their orders are to process as many illegal migrants into the United States as quickly as possible.
Second, this crisis could be stopped immediately by a president who respects his constitutional duty “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” When I have asked what changes need to be made to our current laws to stop this invasion, these officers have said that it’s not a matter of changing law it is a matter of enforcing it. Trump did, and illegal crossings dropped precipitously. They also pleaded Congress not to provide more funding, since it would be used solely to expedite processing into the interior. As one said, CBP has become a travel agency for the cartels to complete their human trafficking to communities throughout the United States.
But there is much the Congress could do to restore our nation’s borders even while Biden still controls the White House. On the top of the list is to fully restore and require the Trump Migrant Protection Protocols and complete the border wall as a condition of any further funding.
Once our current laws are being enforced, the abuse of our asylum laws must end. When legitimate asylum claimants cross out of the country that is persecuting them, they have achieved asylum and should only be allowed to make a claim in that country. The Flores Settlement, which limits the ability of the federal government to detain families with minors, needs to be repealed in favor of upholding the law that requires detaining all illegal crossers until their cases are resolved.
Without enforcing our immigration laws, we effectively have no borders. And if we have no borders, we cease to be a nation and instead become a vast international territory between Canada and Mexico.
That is now happening with astonishing speed, and we are fast running out of time to avoid joining the long list of civilizations that fell because they could not or would not secure their borders. Let that not be the epitaph of America.
• Tom McClintock is a United States Representative from California’s Fourth Congressional District. He is a member of the House Judiciary Committee where he serves as Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship.
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