The Patriot Post® · Border Backlash

It’s no secret that Democrats have long supported open borders. But during the Biden administration, they opened the floodgates, allowing millions of illegal aliens to enter the country without any vetting process.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Between 2021 and 2025, in one of the most bizarre episodes in U.S. immigration history, the border simply disappeared. There were to be no background checks, no health audits, and no identification of the greatest influx in any four-year period in U.S. history.”

No doubt, many immigrants are good people seeking a better life. But far too many are child molesters, gang members, drug dealers, financial criminals, and violent offenders. The problem is we never bothered to check. During the COVID-19 pandemic, American citizens were banned from going to school or church while MS-13 gang members walked across the border into our communities.

“Given that it is much easier to destroy the border and allow millions to enter than to restore it and find the millions who entered illegally,” Hanson adds, “the Democrats’ response has been Orwellian. After assuming the law did not apply to illegal alien entrants, they now insist its full force must apply to each of 10 million aliens before they can be sent home.”

Publicly, Democrats have errantly claimed that unlimited immigration makes the country safer, stronger, and more prosperous. But now it’s clear that Biden’s border dereliction has had the opposite effect. All along, Democrats never cared to ask the essential question: What are the consequences of open borders? The failure of Biden and the Democrats to answer this question is a primary reason Donald Trump was elected to serve another term and carry out his promise to close the border.

Despite the media collectively turning their heads away from what Trump has accomplished, the president has effectively ended illegal immigration. As Axios reports, “President Trump promised the most deportations in decades to reverse illegal immigration. But the system for legal immigration is also buckling under his pressure. In just the last few weeks, the Trump administration has threatened to expand the travel ban list, paused all asylum decisions, and signaled it will reopen cases from the Biden administration.”

Trump has not only prevented new illegal immigrants from entering the country and sent illegal alien criminals back home, but he’s located countless numbers of minor children the Biden administration lost along the way. As Matt Margolis expounds, “According to Border Czar Tom Homan, the Trump administration has already rescued more than 62,000 migrant kids from horrific situations like sex trafficking and forced labor after crossing the border alone during the Biden years.” More alarming is that nearly 300,000 minors are still waiting to be found.

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration and the media pretended none of it was happening. “One of the most perplexing of all the attitudes that liberals have exhibited during the debates over illegal immigration is their indifference to the fact that the Biden administration handed hundreds of thousands of children to unvetted adults, losing them into an underworld that included forced child labor and sex trafficking,” laments David Strom. He continues, “Nobody in the Biden administration exhibited any curiosity at all about what was happening, and when the movie Sound of Freedom came out, there was a full-court press in the media to deny that any child trafficking existed at all, calling it a ‘moral panic’.”

As more evidence of the Democrat ambivalence about illegal immigrants and the risk some of them pose, states like Illinois are intentionally releasing them into society. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is warning that Illinois officials are releasing violent criminal illegal aliens despite active immigration detainers, a move the agency says is putting the public at risk,” Fox News reports. “Todd Lyons, ICE’s senior official performing the duties of director, said Illinois has ‘tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens’ in custody — individuals who, he noted, have committed crimes ranging from murder and rape to child pornography and armed robbery.”

There’s increasing evidence that the Trump administration is not only focused on deporting illegal aliens who’ve committed crimes, but also those who are criminals by default because they entered the country illegally in the first place. Unfortunately, there’s an optics problem with that.

Democrats, for their part, continue doubling down on their radical defense of illegal alien criminals by calling ICE agents kidnappers, halting courthouse arrests, neglecting violent attacks on immigration officers, and calling for ICE to be abolished. Democrats have traveled abroad to publicly defend gang members and other violent criminals deported by the Trump administration instead of protecting the people in their home districts, who are still vulnerable to other dangerous illegals roaming the streets.

The consequences of legal and illegal immigration are suddenly becoming clear to most Americans, who now see how the Democrat “salad bowl” theory of tribalism tears apart the fabric of our nation. They don’t want new arrivals to become Americans, to adopt our customs and traditions, or even to follow our laws. Far too many illegal immigrants are turning American towns and cities into extensions of their home countries, taking what they can get instead of thinking of how they can contribute. Now, Democrats have gone so far as to support and defend illegal immigrants who threaten the safety of American citizens they’re supposed to represent. As a result, it’s becoming harder for the Left to preserve its position.

It’ll be interesting to see how long Democrats can keep this up before it turns on them politically. One thing is clear: They’re making the choice between the two political parties crystal clear. Republicans support defending Americans, while Democrats fight for those who come here illegally and threaten the safety and prosperity of our communities. In the 2026 midterms, there really isn’t any other issue this important. If we don’t have borders and laws, then nothing else matters.