OPINION:
We have been watching the great American border robbery.
How did President Biden do it? He put a methodical mix of executive actions in place and rearranged federal money to turn what were once Mexican border enforcers into U.S. greeting parties for over 5 million illegal immigrants in 32 months.
Mr. Biden’s team has no idea where huge numbers ended up in the U.S. or what they are doing.
Even worse, the invisible border has ushered in a de facto alliance between Mr. Biden and the Mexican cartels. Safely ensconced in Mexico, they rake in millions by poisoning and killing us with Chinese-designed drugs and by smuggling slave children, gang members and terrorists. The cartel’s take on smuggling alone is over $10 billion a year.
If Mr. Biden’s portrait does not adorn cartel haciendas for nightly tequila toasts, it should.
This illegal scheme by Mr. Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has one central purpose: more Democratic voters. The groundwork is already underway by left-wing activists to devalue U.S. citizenship so they can attach newcomers to registration rolls.
No research center has done a better job of explaining his Texas-size Biden/Mayorkas scam than The Heritage Foundation, the venerable conservative think tank.
After two years of border chaos and death, Heritage released a deep-dive report that explains the crime scene step by step.
“The Biden Administration is using hundreds of billions of federal dollars to shift federal agencies and personnel further away from enforcing the nation’s immigration laws and toward processing and accommodating millions more illegal aliens,” researchers Erin Dwinell and Hannah Davis wrote. “This policy agenda defies federal law and abuses American taxpayer dollars, and Congress should act to halt it.”
To me, the report, “The Cost of Biden’s Border Crisis: The First Two Years,” makes a great case for impeaching the president: clear dereliction of duty. He took an oath to protect us, then launched an anti-American scheme to let in cartel/gang traffic if that meant the overall human onslaught included Democratic voters.
The report examined budget documents to show that Mr. Biden and Democrats shifted money to take personnel away from enforcement and into creating the Border Patrol welcoming committee.
He executed 296 executive actions, of which 89 ended former President Donald Trump’s border security measures, which had included advanced background checks. Mr. Biden put in place new regulations making taxpayer-funded benefits of cash payments, food, and medical care readily available to illegal migrants.
The Department of Homeland Security hired more Customers and Border Protection officers — not to enforce the law, but to process illegal immigrants faster.
Mr. Biden larded nongovernment activist groups with scads of money to funnel migrants across the border. The funding comes from the State Department’s Migration and Refugee Assistance account, which is slated to receive $35 billion in new spending over the next eight years.
The reality is that an illegal immigrant can arrive, apply for asylum, and then enjoy the fruits of America for years as the bureaucracy works through a hopelessly long waiting list.
It’s a game the Biden administration is all too willing to play.
“There is no annual cap on asylum applications and no fee for the application,” wrote Lora Ries, director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center. “With nearly 9 million benefit applications pending at [U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services] and over 2.2 million cases in the immigration court backlog, aliens know that filing an asylum application buys them years here in the U.S., during which time they can work, have U.S. citizen children, and put down roots, making their deportation less likely.”
That this is a scam based on bogus asylum claims is underscored by this fact: U.S. immigration judges granted only 14% of asylum petitions last year. In other words, the vast majority of asylum claims are bogus.
While Heritage issues reports explaining Mr. Biden’s treachery, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, unleashed a lawsuit to uncover how Mr. Mayorkas gutted border patrol safeguards to ensure that millions of migrants were illegally released into the country.
Mr. Mayorkas did this by scuttling mechanisms in place to reject migrants on the spot while limiting detention capacity, Ms. Moody discovered.
Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz, who recently retired, testified that those two moves left him no choice but to release thousands of illegals on a continuing basis.
Ms. Moody said Mr. Mayorkas clearly violated federal law. She cited a Supreme Court decision that said migrants “shall” be detained until they are deported, or their asylum claims are granted.
“Yet, from the beginning of the Biden Administration and Secretary Mayorkas’s service, DHS has had a non-detention policy, where illegal immigrants were not only being released but they were being released without even having a removal proceeding begun or making an asylum claim,” Ms. Moody wrote in April to House Republican leaders as she called on them to impeach the homeland security secretary.
She added, “Secretary Mayorkas has handed the keys to our border to organizations [read cartels] that should be designated foreign terrorist organizations.”
As Mr. Biden was taking office, Customs and Border Protection completed a talking-points paper obtained by Ms. Moody. CBP stated that migrants “have and will likely increase in fiscal year (FY) 2021 as economic opportunities emerge and migrant perceptions of U.S. immigration policies shift.”
That “perception” came right from the horse’s mouth — the horse being then-candidate Biden.
In a Democratic debate, Mr. Biden called for a “surge” at the border “immediately.” He papered over his invasion call by saying “people seeking asylum,” which he and we know is a scam.
Illegal immigrants, frustrated by Mr. Trump and his wall and his series of moves to secure America, knew what the word “surge” meant.
Three years later, they have put up record-breaking numbers — 5 million border-crossers and counting.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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