You know that feeling on a Wednesday night when you’ve reheated the chili you made on Sunday for the third time, and you can’t face it again so throw it away and order take-out?
That’s how I felt watching Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas pitch the latest iteration of the Biden administration’s plan to handle the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens arriving in the United States every month.
Last Thursday’s announcement of new measures, as the end of Title 42 threatens an even greater flood, is too little, too late. Department of Homeland Security’s “six pillar plan” from last year isn’t working, yet now they’re doubling down on a losing streak.
The Biden immigration plans are failing because they make six major mistakes in strategy and tactics.
The first fundamental mistake they made was to end Trump administration’s measures, like the Migrant Protection Protocols and Asylum Cooperative Agreements, that were successfully deterring, detaining, and deporting illegal foreigners attempting to enter the United States.
They did this for reasons of politics and ideology, rather than taking time to think through the consequences of dismantling border controls if they failed to come up with an alternative.
The Biden team fought in court to kill Title 42. Now that measure, which allowed us to expel illegal foreign arrivals based on health reasons during Covid, is off the table.
Mayorkas says “the government will return to Title 8 processing.” In fact, Title 8 has been the law in effect all along, they just undermine and bypass it to let in as many people as possible.
Their second mistake was in thinking that you can ever throw enough money at vague “root causes” like poverty and poor government, let alone climate change, to stop people wanting to leave poor countries. That is classic socialist thinking – and as Margaret Thatcher said, “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Vice President Harris has touted $4.2 billion in private sector commitments to northern Central America, but much of this money was already committed long before she came along. It is also a drop in the bucket compared to the money sent home by Central Americans working legally and illegally in the U.S.
Their third mistake was to think that you can every have enough tent cities, processing officers, planes, and buses to get an unlimited supply of illegal crossers off the border and out of the press.
DHS built tent cities all along the U.S. border and even a Southwest Border Coordinating Center. Now they are building Regional Processing Centers in Colombia and Guatemala, with plans for more to come.
If these centers were built to identify genuine refugees for entry into the U.S. Refugee Admission Program, or USRAP, that would be a good idea. Such centers exist in many countries and help the U.S. admit thousands of genuine refugees a year.
Recently, however, the U.S. hasn’t even met its own targets – last year they only admitted 25,000. That’s because they were too busy catching and releasing illegal border crossers. The legal, time-tested, and relatively secure USRAP system was sacrificed to the chaos we see today.
But these new Regional Centers “will also be a referral point for lawful pathways as well” according to Blinken.
Activist NGOs working in these new foreign Centers to “expedite prescreening of individuals for lawful pathways to the United States” will be yet another way to expand the Biden administration’s already illegal and historically unprecedented abuse of immigration parole.
The State Department said in a press briefing that the DHS plan is “really at a level of ambition and scale that has never been done before,” touting the “number of legal pathways that we’re opening.”
What’s really on a scale never seen before is the administration’s brazen disregard of U.S. immigration law.
“Legal pathways” in Biden-speak is an oxymoron. Neither the $30,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelans to be paroled in every month, nor the two million others released into the interior under Biden so far, are “legal” according to a judge in Florida. As for the “pathways,” the only place they lead is into immigration oblivion: appointments for first interviews with the latest-released illegal aliens are now being made for 2033 in New York City’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
The Biden team’s fourth mistake is to assume that Americans will accept this situation, and its considerable costs, forever. Even loyal New York Democrat Mayor Eric Adams seems to have reached the end of his rope, saying that “the national government has turned its back on New York City” and asking Washington “Why are you doing this to New York?”
With full shelters, running out of hotels to rent, and claiming to be over $4 billion in the hole in caring for illegal immigrants caught and released at the border, Adams wants border cities to deal with this crisis on their own.
The administration’s fifth mistake was in thinking that anyone outside the liberal U.S. media will pay any attention when Mayorkas says, yet again, that “our border is not open and will not be open after May 11.”
Blinken said, in announcing the new efforts on April 27, that “we’re working to counter disinformation being spread by traffickers and other bad actors.”
The Biden administration’s real message, that most illegal aliens who attempt entry will be allowed in, is getting out there just fine. And having brought a quarter million foreign minors into the country to be handed to unvetted guardians, allowed to work illegally, or just plain lost, this administration is arguably one of the biggest traffickers out there.
Their sixth mistake was to expand an already unfair “family reunification parole” program that lets relatives of U.S. citizens from Cuba and Haiti wait for their visa numbers, which are limited per country each year, inside this country. Family reunification is already a goal of U.S. immigration.
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