The Patriot Post® · Biden's Cynical Illegal Immigration EO

President Joe Biden has finally taken action on the border. Yesterday, he signed an executive order (EO) to bring order to the border … or so he would have us believe. In truth, the EO is an optics ploy more than it is an effort to stem the flow of illegals streaming over our borders.

He falsely asserted, “I’ve come here today to do what the Republicans in Congress refused to do … take the necessary steps to secure our border.” He hopes voters will blame Republicans for the crisis he set out to create starting on his first day in the Oval Office.

As Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) put it, “He really could have used his authority all along. We all know that. And yet he chose to do absolutely nothing about it. So why is he doing it now? Well, folks, you don’t have to be that intelligent to see what’s going on. We have an election just a few months away and this is the number one issue across the United States.”

.@SenJoniErnst: “He really could have used his authority all along; we all know that, and yet he chose to do absolutely nothing about it.” pic.twitter.com/Qp0yhUSbqU

— Senate Republican Communications Center (@SRCC) June 4, 2024

Biden has heard the discontent of a majority of voters who cite border security as their number one issue and give Biden low marks for handling it — lower even than inflation and the economy. He isn’t handling the border because he intended for this invasion to happen. On his first day in office, he stopped building the border wall. Moreover, he lifted policies like Title 42 that discouraged illegal border-hopping. Ever since he took office, the number of known illegals entering the country has broken records — each year worse than the last — and it’s only now that he is bothering to act? Don’t buy it for a second.

So, what exactly is Biden’s big plan? Namely, barring illegals who cross unlawfully from receiving asylum. That ban will be in place until the number is reduced to a seven-day average of 2,500 illegals crossing a day. To put this in perspective, even the Associated Press admits, “Average daily arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico were last below 2,500 in January 2021, the month that Biden took office. The last time the border encounters dipped to 1,500 a day was in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.” More importantly, even Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said that anything above 1,000 crossings a day overwhelms the system.

Even with those 2,500 crossings — which, by the way, discount gotaways — there are exceptions to the ban, like unaccompanied minors or people who are in fear for their lives or have a medical emergency, to name a couple.

As Senator Deb Fisher (R-NE) retorted, “The message of President Biden’s executive order: you can enter our country illegally, just make sure you’re one of the first few thousand each day to do so.”

Then there are those illegals who actually wait for their asylum appointment and show up at their designated point of entry for their hearing, and that’s about 1,500 a day. There are also the migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua who were given parole under Biden. The New York Post reports that the migrants being flown directly into the U.S. under this scheme total around 400,000 a year.

As another New York Post article points out, that’s roughly 1.8 million known illegals getting asylum in the U.S. per year. So Biden’s not really stopping the influx of illegal immigrants, and he’s not really deterring them from entering unlawfully.

As Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) astutely put it, the number of illegal aliens crossing the border per day should be zero.

Biden’s plan also seeks to seize more fentanyl at the border and to work with Mexico to stop cartels from using mules to get the deadly drug into the U.S. As Biden said yesterday, “We’ve chosen to work together with Mexico as an equal partner. The facts are clear: Due to the arrangement that I have reached with President [Andrés Manuel López] Obrador, the numbers of migrants coming to our shared border unlawfully … has dropped dramatically.” According to CBP statistics, however, the overall drop is negligible, and that’s not accounting for the inevitable summer increase.

Biden’s EO also requires money that Congress has yet to provide. He wants to hire more border security agents, more judges to process asylum claims, and more asylum officers to help question illegals claiming refuge.

Then there’s the legal kerfuffle. A similar EO by Trump in 2018 was quashed by several federal judges. Even The Washington Post admits, “Biden’s executive order is almost certain to trigger immediate lawsuits.” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt has already said, “We intend to sue. A ban on asylum is illegal just as it was when Trump unsuccessfully tried it.”

This is perhaps the most twisted part of the EO, and it’s a win-win for Biden. If the EO goes unchallenged legally, there will still be 1.8 million people entering the country annually, which he and the Democrats want anyway. If it’s struck down, he can blame the courts. If he is especially lucky and it rises to the Supreme Court, he can blame conservative justices for stopping his efforts to secure the border and use his defeat to discredit the Court.

At the end of the day, this executive order is a cynical move that doesn’t help the American people or the illegals who are entering the country. The order “won’t stop the invasion,” as Donald Trump put it. “It’s weak, and it’s pathetic. It will actually make the invasion worse.” Biden continues to facilitate this humanitarian crisis, and his own people will bear the cost. It really is a travesty.