Biden’s open border & the open question

If a frank enemy of the United States had taker over the executive branch this past January, I wonder if he would conduct himself one whit differently than have Joe Biden, his administration, and his Democratic enablers in Congress and the media. This isn’t the point that Andrew McCarthy expressly makes in his August 7 NR column “Why the Border Crisis Is Here to Stay,” but the column supports the point and it is the one I would like to make.

NR has unfortunately placed this critically important column behind its paywall. Here is a representative excerpt:

The federal government is aiding and abetting illegal immigration. That is a violation of federal law and thus another manifestation of Biden’s disregard for his solemn duty to execute the laws faithfully, on unabashed display this week with his dictatorial eviction-moratorium decree, which he and his administration concede is unconstitutional.

Immigration law commands that aliens who do not have a legal right to be present in the United States “shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed.” That is, even those who credibly claim to fear persecution if returned from whence they came — the infinitesimally small percentage of legitimate refugees among the hordes now seeking entry — are supposed to be held in custody until that claim is fully adjudicated.

But Biden has signaled that the border is open and that those who try to cross illegally stand an excellent chance of getting in and staying. Rhetorically, the president pretends the laws are being enforced, but he knows this is impossible in the conditions he has willfully created. The government is woefully short of the detention space, enforcement personnel, and administrative resources that would be needed to handle the vast migrant crowds arriving daily.

Here is one more:

The numbers here are staggering, even if we were to make-believe, Biden-style, that every illegal alien who crosses the border is “encountered” by border enforcement agents. (The government prefers to speak of “encountering migrants” because it can’t say it is detaining every alien who enters illegally, as the law mandates.)

In July, there were 210,000 such “encounters,” the highest monthly figure in decades, but a figure that in the Biden era is becoming run-of-the-mill. Before hitting 190,000 in June, it had hovered around 180,000 per month since March and was significantly up year-over-year before that. Meantime, as our Zachary Evans reports, 834 unaccompanied alien minors arrived at the border on Wednesday, the largest daily total on record. Just for the month of July, that figure was over 19,000.

The administration — which maintains that the president is above the law he is sworn to uphold when the law doesn’t suit his purposes — postures that, in the matter of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the president’s hands are tied by a court-endorsed stipulation. This is the “Flores settlement agreement,” which transnational–progressive officials in the Clinton administration struck in 1997 with the Democrats’ allied alien-rights activists. Contrary to its disregard for immigration and public-health statutes, the Biden administration insists that it must abide by this caprice, notwithstanding that Congress has never codified the decree and that the Supreme Court had ruled, earlier in the same litigation, that alien minors have no right to be released in the United States.

Now, let’s move from government “encounters” with illegal immigration to the reality of the matter.

A significant percentage of illegal aliens smuggle their way into the country without apprehension or inspection. The government’s “encounter” tabulation probably reflects less than 70 percent of the total influx, and perhaps much less than that. As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew R. Arthur details, “the true number of migrants who have entered illegally this year is close to 1.6 million.” That’s a population slightly larger than that of Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth-largest city. Hundreds of thousands of those have gotten in — separate and apart from the “encountered” migrants, many of whom Biden is settling rather than detaining and removing.

We are not talking about managing an unremarkable illegal-immigration problem, as any advanced country must do. In these numbers, it is an invasion — and hostile, even if not armed, because it quite consciously violates our laws and our sovereignty.

As long as the Biden policies remain in place, there is no end in sight; the challenge just metastasizes. Treating us as if we were imbeciles, the administration assures us that it is moving migrants away from the border (i.e., deeper into the country) to centers where they are “processed” and given dates to show up for hearings, at which their refugee and other claims to remain in the U.S. will be adjudicated. But this is ridiculous.

How would an enemy of the United States do any differently? That is the question that seems to me to emerge inescapably from McCarthy’s column. It is certainly the one that I keep asking myself.

UPDATE: I would like to note that Andy expresses no disagreement with me. (I meant to write that this is a critically important column, not “a critically important.”)

Scott, thanks so much.

— Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) August 8, 2021