It’s an election year, and Joe Biden once again finds himself running against Donald Trump. However, this time around, Biden has to defend his presidential record — and an abysmal record it is, which is why Biden is underwater on nearly every major issue and underwater against Trump.

Arguably, there was no issue bigger for Trump during his 2016 campaign than illegal immigration. “Build the wall” was perhaps the most memorable utterance of the entire campaign. But while Trump was stymied by a Congress that was divided over the issue, there was no question he worked to fulfill his promise even if the challenge proved to be bigger and thornier to navigate than he had imagined.

And why was it so difficult for Trump to accomplish what Democrat lawmakers themselves had called for just a decade earlier?

The reason is Washington’s calculus of power. Democrats realized that in order to keep and grow Washington’s power, they needed a bigger potential voting bloc. It’s the strategy they used to successfully turn California deep blue. And it’s the strategy Biden has been engaged in implementing since day one of taking office.

The trouble is that the nearly unchecked influx of nine million illegal aliens into the U.S. has the vast majority of Americans demanding an end to the surge and control of our border. Thus, Biden and company launched a bait-and-switch strategy. As we have repeatedly observed, the Biden administration, along with its Leftmedia cohorts, has moved from a position of denying the existence of a border crisis to blaming Republican lawmakers for supposedly preventing Biden from tackling it.

Even as Biden readies his State of the Union Address tonight, he plans to hang the immigration crisis around Republicans’ necks for failing to pass the Democrats’ bad border bill. As the president himself recently stated, “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends.”

That is ironic, but not surprising; during a nationally televised Democrat presidential debate back in 2019, Biden declared that “all those people who are seeking asylum” should “immediately surge to the border.” Biden then laid out his immigration plan, as he promised to surge agents and judges to the border to ensure as many migrants as possible would get into the country. Biden further promised: “In the first 100 days of my administration, no one, no one, will be deported at all. From that point on, the only deportations that will take place are commissions of felonies in the United States of America.” And to his “credit,” Biden has stuck to that radical immigration non-enforcement promise.

But a majority of Americans are increasingly rejecting that radical illegal immigration agenda — especially after gruesome murders like that of Laken Riley. Yet rather than changing course, Biden spins the blame. He falsely claims that he is powerless to do anything about the problem without Congress’s help when the truth is that he could easily reverse course and start enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. But that would go against the plan.

If anyone still doubts that a de facto open border is not Biden’s plan, then the recent revelation that his administration used its CPB One program to fly 320,000 migrants from Latin America to 43 U.S. cities should dispel those doubts. This scheme allowed the Biden administration to bring in migrants and bypass the border ports of entry. We learned about it thanks to a recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Center for Immigration Studies, but we still don’t know which specific cities these illegal aliens were flown to.

“Under these legally dubious parole programs,” explained CIS’s report author Todd Bensman, “aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization.”

So, not only is Biden disingenuously claiming his hands are tied in being able to address the illegal alien migration crisis, but his administration is actively aiding and abetting it. And now he plans to tell the American people a bald-faced lie: that it’s those “racist” MAGA Republicans who are to blame.