Home Andrew R. Arthur Nearly 1.06 Million CBP Encounters at Southwest Border Thus Far in FY 2022
Nearly 1.06 Million CBP Encounters at Southwest Border Thus Far in FY 2022
And Biden illegal migrant releases now exceed 836,000 — does the president have a plan?
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By Andrew R. Arthur on April 19, 2022
"According to an April filing in Texas v. Biden, CBP encountered 221,303 illegal migrants at the Southwest border last month, bringing total encounters there to just fewer than 1.06 million for just the first half of FY 2022. Worse, DHS released more than 80,000 of those migrants into the interior last month, raising the total number of migrant illegal releases under the Biden administration to 836,225. While it seems the White House doesn’t have a plan to stem the surge of aliens crossing the border illegally, the truth may be much more complicated.
Mandatory Disclosures in Texas v. Biden. Texas is a suit filed in April 2021 by the states of Texas and Missouri, challenging the administration’s suspension of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, better known as “Remain in Mexico”). It was assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
On June 1, while that case was pending, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo terminating MPP. That termination decision was rolled into the pending case brought by the states.
On August 13, Judge Kacsmaryk issued an order enjoining Mayorkas’s termination of MPP. To ensure compliance with its order, the court required DHS to report monthly on the number of CBP encounters at the Southwest border, the number of those aliens expelled under public-health orders issued by CDC under Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the number released into the United States.
The administration appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which sustained Judge Kacsmaryk’s injunction in December. DOJ sought and was granted certiorari, and so the Supreme Court will review the injunction on April 26 (in a matter I have called the “Most Significant Immigration Case — Ever”).
While Texas is pending before the Supreme Court, Judge Kacsmaryk’s order remains in place. Given the Biden administration’s utter lack of transparency when it comes to the deleterious effects of its immigration policies, DHS’s disclosures to the court offer the best view into what is actually occurring at the Southwest border.
A Historically Bad Border Gets Worse. Biden promised in December 2020 that he would create “guardrails” to prevent chaos at the border before reversing his predecessor’s immigration initiatives.
Almost immediately after he was sworn in, however, Biden began dismantling policies and procedures that the Trump administration had implemented to successfully slow illegal entries into the United States, without any plan to deal with the inevitable rush of aliens who would come illegally to take advantage of his more “humane” immigration posture. In lieu of “guardrails”, Biden created a border “sluice”.
As I have previously explained: “’Doing nothing’ to prevent illegal entries is itself a policy, and ‘nothing’ is what the president has done to respond to the flood of illegal migrants pouring across the Southwest border, all but unabated, since February” 2021.
Title 42 is the one quasi-border policy Trump introduced that Biden did not immediately abandon, but there was little the current president could have done to end it at the outset of his term.
I say Title 42 is a “quasi-border policy” because it is not intended to control illegal immigration (which Trump was handling quite well before the pandemic), per se. Rather, it directs DHS to immediately expel illegal migrants solely to prevent the further introduction to and spread of Covid-19 in the United States.
Biden was likely stuck with Title 42 because it would have been politically awkward to allow potentially infected aliens unfettered access to the United States while the White House was imposing exceptional pandemic restrictions (including a federal employee vaccine mandate and an eviction moratorium) on the American population.
Despite Title 42, however, the Southwest border has been in an unprecedented state of chaos under Biden. Border Patrol set an all-time record for apprehensions there in FY 2021, and since the beginning of February 2021 (Biden’s first full month in office), CBP has encountered nearly 2.5 million aliens who have entered illegally or without proper documents at the U.S.-Mexico line."
https://cis.org/Arthur/Nearly-106-Mi...us-Far-FY-2022
Sounds open to me.