The southern border is out of control. To anyone who’s spent any time in New York, Chicago, Texas, San Francisco, Denver, or who bothers to turn on the television and watch the news, this is about as controversial a statement as pointing out that roses are red. And yet, President Biden’s administration appears to have just got the memo—after three years of gaslighting the American people about the security of the border.
And yet, the gaslighting hasn’t stopped. Last week, even President Biden flat out admitted that the border is not secure, he added, “I haven’t believed it for the last ten years. And I’ve said it for the last ten years…give me the money.”
This beats all records for shamelessness. First of all, we have trouble believing that Biden even remembers the last ten years, and secondly, if he truly “hasn’t believed” that the border is secure, then why has he allowed his own secretary of Homeland Security to lie on his behalf to the American people ever since he took office; the same secretary of Homeland Security who, by the way, is now begging migrants not to come and telling them to come during Biden's first year in office all while still pretending the border is secure.
The smell of desperation is thick on the air, and the Democrats are clearly hoping for something, anything they can do to try to shift the blame, or at least to muddy the waters about who’s responsible for this catastrophe, in order to avoid accountability for the consequences of their anti-American policies. Which is why they have now taken the extraordinary step of pretending that congress needs to pass legislation empowering them to protect the border – legislation which they clearly hope will include funding for all sorts of unrelated goodies, like more slush fund money for Ukraine.
Let’s be clear: anyone with two brain cells to rub together should see the cynicism behind this attempt to make a legislative silk purse out of the sow’s ear of their own incompetence. But just because anyone can see it doesn’t mean that the Biden administration’s sniveling toadies in the media will acknowledge it. Take, for example, the absurd attempt by liberal columnist Froma Harrop to pretend that Republicans who refuse to go along with this charade are somehow branding themselves the party of “open borders,” who would rather let the border crisis languish for political gain than give the Biden administration the power to stop it.
Left deliberately unstated in the harangues of Harrop and those like her is a simple fact: the Biden administration already has the power to stop illegal immigration. In fact, it is because of the Biden administration’s authority over the border that the crisis happened in the first place. Ever since he took office, Biden has used a slew of executive orders to defang US immigration policy. To take just one example, in February of 2021, Biden put out an executive order which increased the number of refugees the United States would accept from foreign nations every year from 15,000 (under President Trump) to 125,000. What’s more, Biden ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy instated by the Trump administration with zero congressional action. The Biden policy could be summed up as "remain in the US on our dime while waiting for a court date years down the road."
Yes, the millions of people who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, who ditch their IDs by the roadside then claim refugee or asylum status, who are processed as such by border agents and given court dates to plead their cases before an immigration judge some five years into the future, are then housed at the expense of the American taxpayer while they wait. DHS has said outright that most of those who enter this way and seek this status will not be found eligible for it, yet Americans from Seattle to New York are footing the bill for food, shelter, transportation. It is impossible not to think that the Dem plan is to force through a massive amnesty for the nearly 8 million people processed through the border in this fashion.
The logic is clear: if President Biden can alter the rules to open the border with nothing but a pen and a phone, he can alter them to shutter it.
However, to do so would be to run afoul of Biden’s campaign promises. Oh, not his promises to the American people, no, it would be gauche to keep promises to us. No, we mean his campaign promises to the migrants themselves, like the promise that he would rescind all of President Trump’s immigration policies in his first hundred days—which he pretty much did. And the migrants got the message. As early as March 2021, those showing up at the US-Mexico border could be found wearing Biden-branded T-shirts and holding signs with messages like “Biden, please let us in.” They know who Biden works for, and it ain’t us. “America First” has given way to “Americans Last.”
Even The New York Times seems to realize how bad things have gotten. While still parroting the Biden party line that Republican intransigence is partially to blame for Biden’s inability to act (even though that “intransigence” more or less amounts to doing the job Biden won’t do, particularly in states like Texas), the Times was also forced to admit that Biden’s administration has been paralyzed by divisions among his staff, some of whom favor actual enforcement of border security and some of whom are woke "Abolish ICE" style fanatics. Moreover, the Times wrote, one crisis after another has given Biden’s “humane” vision of immigration a bad name and raised the specter that the Left’s approach is completely unworkable. For a president who owes his election to woke activists, this kind of rebuke from reality must be avoided at all costs, which is why Biden is desperately trying to get some kind of win out of the border crisis: in this case, by using it to force Republicans to fund his administration’s holy cow, Ukraine.
Which gets to the other reason why the Biden administration’s spin is complete nonsense: Republicans have already passed a bill to deal with the border crisis. In May of last year, by a vote of 219-213, the House passed the Secure the Border Act of 2023, which funds an E-Verify system and imposes the exact kind of hard limits on asylum eligibility that the Biden administration claims to need in order to combat the crisis. You know what it doesn’t include, though? Funding for Ukraine. Which is why Biden is pretending it doesn’t exist; because his White House doesn’t actually want to secure the border. They just know they can’t openly say they prefer America’s cities to be in chaos for the sake of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), so they’re trying to find some way to change the subject.
Republicans should not let them, and so far, they haven’t. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has already called the administration’s bluff on the border multiple times, in increasingly stringent tones. “The president can take executive action immediately and he’s pretending as though he does not know that,” Johnson thundered at a press conference Tuesday. “It’s outrageous. The American people are demanding action, [and] we’re going to deliver it in every way we possibly can.”
He’s telling the truth. Republicans will take action on the border in every way they can, short of letting the border be held hostage in exchange for spending that has everything to do with securing Ukraine’s border and nothing to do with ours. The Biden White House has three options, and only three: it can either accept Republicans’ terms, actually take action to fix the problem with the ample power it already has, or go on being blamed for a crisis it created. In short, the Democrats have no leverage, and Republicans should call their bluff, rather than go on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and enabling Democrats to evade the consequences of their own toxic agenda.
