There’s been a lot of nonsense about the southern border going around lately from the usual suspects, starting with the Biden administration’s smug Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. In two separate interviews last week, Mayorkas blamed the record number of illegal immigrants crossing into the country on climate change and later refused to call the situation a crisis, retreating to his favorite euphemism for the debacle at the border: “It’s a challenge,” he said.
It sure is, not least because in December more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were arrested at the border, the largest monthly total ever recorded. The numbers being what they are, it’s getting difficult to characterize what’s happened to our border under Biden. One way to put it is to note that at the current rate, we can expect 12 million arrests at the border in the first term of the Biden presidency, which is more than the preceding three terms combined. Most of those migrants have been released into the United States.
Or think of the problem from a different angle. Only 142,580 illegal immigrants were deported in all of 2023, which is less than half the number that illegally crossed the border in December alone. Those who were released into the country joined the more than 3 million-case backlog in our immigration courts, where it can take years for an asylum case to get an initial hearing.
So yes, it’s a “challenge,” as Mayorkas says, but probably not as much of a challenge as maintaining the cognitive dissonance required to keep going on
