OPINION:
A short while ago, President Biden commented on negotiations over the Senate’s border bill. He said, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.” The only problem with that assertion is that President Pinocchio is lying through his teeth.
Any claim that the chief executive of the United States lacks authority to enforce our borders is absurd. As former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said, “If you don’t have borders, then you don’t have a country.”
That is not just a catchy rallying cry. In 1892, the Supreme Court said essentially the same thing in Ekiu v. United States. The court said, “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”
That’s legalese for “no border, no country.” And it is worth noting that the holding in Ekiu has never been overturned.
8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the president express authority to close the border, simply restates the Ekiu holding in statutory form: Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem appropriate.
So, there it is: The Supreme Court has held that the United States is entitled to close its borders to whomever it wishes, whenever it wishes. And Congress expressly delegated that responsibility to the president in Section 1182(f).
That all seems clear on its face. But court opinions and statutes — with their complex legal terminology — sometimes mean something other than what they appear to say. So how do we know that Mr. Biden could close the southern border right now, if he wanted to, by simply issuing a proclamation? Because his predecessor did exactly that. And when he did, the anti-borders contingent sued, and Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump a racist.
The lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump won, and the court, in no uncertain terms, stated that Section 1182(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act confers broad discretion upon the president to shut down the border. Moreover, the justices added that the statute “entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions.”
In plain English, that means that a president can decide that millions of bogus asylum-seekers crossing our border illegally would be detrimental to our public safety, national security and economic stability. And, having made that determination, he may decide to suspend the entry of asylum-seekers until such time as he determines that the danger presented by that group of aliens has passed.
Mr. Biden and his minions, political advisers and supporters are well aware of all of this. They were actively involved in the media campaign to falsely portray Mr. Trump’s 1182(f) proclamation as a discriminatory, impermissible “Muslim ban.” And they threw a hissy fit when they lost. In 2018, the anti-borders Brennan Center for Justice insisted that “Trump’s travel ban is still unconstitutional, and we will keep challenging it in court” — despite the fact that the issue became legally moot following the Supreme Court decision.
In a nutshell, and to borrow his own words, Mr. Biden is being a lying, dog-faced pony soldier. Republican senators should be asking themselves why they were negotiating with the White House to get the president to do something he is clearly authorized to do.
And Americans should be asking what Mr. Biden is up to. He appears more concerned about foreign lawbreakers with no ties to the United States than he does about the safety and security of Americans who are being displaced and assaulted by mobs of foreigners who shouldn’t be here in the first place.
• Tom Homan is a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Matt O’Brien is director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the co-host of the podcast “No Border, No Country.” Before working for the institute, he served as an immigration judge. He has nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law and policy, having held numerous positions in the Department of Homeland Security.
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