Biden Could Have Secured The Border At Any Time

One of the first things President Donald Trump did after being sworn in at the inauguration Monday was sign a series of executive orders on immigration and the border. A few of them stand out because they demonstrate how the border could have been secured at any point over the past four years by the Biden administration, without any action or new legislation from Congress.

That it wasn’t is a testament to the fact that Biden and the Democrats wanted mass illegal immigration, they wanted chaos on the southern border, and they wanted the Mexican drug cartels to be empowered and enriched. These were outcomes they intentionally chose, over and against border security and the historic low levels of illegal immigration they inherited from the first Trump administration.

Here’s what Trump did. First, he declared an emergency at the border and ordered the U.S. military to immediately resume construction of the border wall, which Biden had abruptly halted upon taking office (so abruptly, in fact, that construction materials were simply left on site or abandoned when Biden ordered work on the wall to cease).

As part of the emergency declaration, Trump also ordered U.S. troops to be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border under U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). These troops, together with the National Guard, will work to prioritize U.S. territorial integrity “by repelling forms of invasion, including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking and other criminal activities,” according to incoming administration officials. 

Trump also ordered an immediate end to the use of the CBP One app that the Biden administration had used to dole out mass paroles for illegal border-crossers — some 30,000 a month under Biden. As of Monday afternoon, the app was switched off and all pending appointments were canceled. Paroling illegal immigrants is a policy the Biden administration took to unprecedented highs. What was supposed to be a rare policy used on a case-by-case basis was, under Biden, applied to entire classes of illegal immigrants and then codified in the CBP One app as a mechanism for what amounted to a mass catch-and-release policy.

In addition, Trump announced the reinstatement of his Remain in Mexico policy, which was designed to deter bogus asylum claims by mandating that those caught crossing into the U.S. illegally from Mexico and then claiming asylum must wait in Mexico for their asylum cases to be adjudicated. Only a very small percentage of asylum-seekers are ever granted asylum, but they have created such a backlog in our immigration courts that the wait time is now three or four years (or more), during which time asylum-seekers are authorized to live and work in the U.S. while their cases wind through our sclerotic immigration court system. 

No more. The Remain in Mexico policy was meant to tamp down the scourge of bogus asylum claims by not rewarding illegal immigrants with a years-long pass into the U.S. with work authorization — the very thing most of them are coming for. During Trump’s first term, Remain in Mexico worked as a powerful deterrent to illegal immigration. Knowing that there was no free pass into the U.S. simply by filing an asylum claim, the number of illegal crossings plummeted. After all, economic migrants from all over the world don’t want to be stuck in northern Mexican border towns when they know there’s almost no chance they will win their asylum cases. 

Finally, Trump ordered that criminal cartels in Mexico be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, which will allow federal authorities to more easily remove members of gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. It will also allow the administration to use the Emergency Economic Powers Act to target the financial assets and operations of powerful Mexican cartels like Sinaloa and CJNG, and generally give the federal government more tools to go after them, including targeted sanctioning of their leaders. It remains to be seen whether this designation will include cross-border raids and military operations, but it should. The cartels need to know that with Trump in office, they are no longer safe — on either side of the border.   

The Biden administration could have done all of this — or it could have simply left in place Trump’s border policies, which had reduced illegal immigration to record lows during his first term. As Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming border czar, said recently of Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas: “He inherited the most secure border in my lifetime. He just had to sit there and do nothing. He’s systematically destroyed that border. They knew exactly what they were doing when they destroyed that border.”

In fact, Mayorkas bragged about how many Trump-era policies the Biden administration rescinded in January 2021 — too many to count, he said at the time. The border policies Trump had in place at the end of his first term were working, and he enacted them simply through executive action (for better or worse, U.S. immigration law is designed to give broad leeway to the executive branch agencies tasked with border security and immigration enforcement). He didn’t need to rely on action from Congress, as Biden would later insist when faced with public backlash over his own open border policies.

What we saw Monday with the enacting of these executive orders from Trump (the first of many) is that a secure border was always within reach these past four years. Biden and the Democrats sold out their fellow Americans, threw open the borders, and then pretended they had no choice in the matter, that forces beyond their control had triggered a mass immigration crisis.

In reality, they created the crisis by incentivizing illegal immigration to a degree never before seen in American history. By removing all the deterrent policies Trump had put in place, and doing everything in their power to facilitate the release of illegal immigrants into American communities, they triggered the very immigration crisis they later claimed to have no power over.

It was a lie and a coverup, and those responsible shouldn’t be allowed to quietly leave office without answering for the destruction they caused at the border and in communities across the country. At the very least, Trump should ensure that the open border policies of the Biden administration can ever be allowed to take effect again. The raft of executive orders on immigration he signed Monday is a good start.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.