America Paying Heavy Price For Biden-Harris Open Border Policies

The border czar has some explaining to do. But don’t count on a complicit corporate media to ask Democrat Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris to answer questions about the mayhem the Biden-Harris administration has caused with their deadly open border policies. 

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, intends to press the point, however. His office has detailed the “breadth and depth” of the destruction in a new 36-page white paper titled, “America Invaded: How the Biden-Harris Border Crisis is Fundamentally Transforming the United States.” The Texas Republican and his constituents in the Lone Star State’s 21st Congressional District have lived with the damage for nearly four years, as have so many other places in the nation dealing with a tsunami of illegal immigrants that has brought the border to their backyards. 

“This document lays out the breadth and depth of the continuing damage to our country — which has morphed from a strong nation built on the rule of law that welcomes immigrants in accordance with that law, to a lawless, dangerous, and unrecognizable collection of individuals without common bond,” Roy said in a press release announcing the report’s release.

The numbers are breathtaking. According to the report, Since President Joe Biden and his No. 2 took office, more than 8.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the U.S. southwest border, approximately the population of the state of Virginia. The Biden-Harris catch and release program has sent at least 5.6 million illegal aliens into the interior of the country, while some 1.9 million “got-aways” have slipped the attention of “distracted and exhausted” U.S. Border Patrol agents. All told, more than 7 million illegals have poured into the United States on the Biden administration’s watch. 

‘Terrible Scourge’

Deadly fentanyl, horrific crimes, and a mountain of dead bodies have accompanied wave after wave of illegal immigrants. According to the report, fentanyl drug overdoses (poisonings) claimed the lives of 75,000 Americans in 2023 — “an average of over 200 deaths a day.” The epidemic is brought to you by the Mexican drug cartels and killer chemicals made in China smuggled across the border. 

“Almost all of us know someone — a family member, a friend, or a neighbor — who has been affected by the terrible scourge of opioid overdose, especially from fentanyl,” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes following last year’s First Regional Family Summit on Fentanyl. “These deaths have torn apart families, schools and communities, and we grieve for the loss of so much life, talent and goodness.” Utah alone counted 541 dead from drug overdoses in 2022, with opioids like fentanyl accounting for three-quarters of the fatalities, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. 

There are thousands more victims of myriad crimes, including some of the more heinous homicides and assaults on record, Roy’s report points out. Consider the families of Laken Riley, Kayla Hamilton, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was reportedly lured under a bridge, assaulted for two hours and strangled to death by two illegal immigrants. The little girl’s body was found bound and stripped in a Houston bayou. 

“While Border Patrol has intercepted increasing numbers of criminals, DHS [Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers revealed on August 11, 2024, that as many as 950,000 violent criminals have gone unidentified,” the Roy report states. “In some cases, CBP did not collect DNA for nearly 70% of illegal border crossers.” 

Welcoming Terrorists

On Sept. 10, 2001, the nation was ill-prepared for the hell that was about to hit it. The border crisis, security officials warn, has potentially planted the seeds of another 9/11.

As the Roy report notes, terrorists are “streaming cross the border in record numbers.” In fiscal year 2023, 169 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border. How many “got-away” terrorists slipped through is anyone’s guess.

“At least 99 illegal aliens on the terror watchlist were released into the U.S. after being apprehended at the southern border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023,” the report notes.

“Alarmingly, individuals and groups with known or suspected ties to terrorism have capitalized on our porous border by smuggling foreign nationals, some of whom originate from terror-prone countries, into the U.S.,” the report continues. 

Meanwhile, drug cartels have been emboldened. According to Roy’s report, the criminal operations are hauling in more than “$13 billion a year off human trafficking alone.” The abuses are horrifying. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s Management Alert issued last month showed the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of up to several hundred thousand illegal immigrant children, many at risk of being victims of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” 

“Mexican cartels have joined forces with Chinese crime syndicates to produce fentanyl and traffic it into American communities,” the white paper states. 

‘Absolutely Bizarre’

None of this should be surprising after Biden rolled out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants even before he took office. In one of his first orders of business, Biden pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations and moved to protect the sanctuary cities — that have been invaded by the illegal immigrants — from ICE and other federal law enforcement authorities. Early on, Biden urged illegals seeking asylum to “surge” to the U.S.-Mexico border. 

“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” Biden said at an Iowa campaign event in 2019, CNN reported. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”

Contrary to the gaslighting by Democrats and their allies in corporate media, Biden made his vice president “border czar” and placed her in charge of investigating the “root causes of migration,” which, it turns out, are Biden-Harris border policies.

As illegal immigration became a top concern of the American people — and a significant political liability for Biden and Harris, who stepped over the octogenarian’s political corpse on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination — the gruesome duo have awkwardly tried to distance themselves from a crisis of their own making. Even Democrat Party press agent CNN has had to begrudgingly report that the new “Build that Wall” Kamala Harris running for president sounds nothing like the sanctuary candidate for president in 2019 and the vice president under Biden. 

Paying the Cost

The Biden-Harris border debacle has come with a huge cost for the U.S. taxpayer. The Roy report shows the tab for the southwest border states has been draining, with Texas alone forced to spend $13 billion on border security initiatives “to do the job the federal government refuses to do.” Biden has fought Texas’ efforts to secure its border in federal court. As of January, “60 Texas counties have invoked disaster declarations over the border crisis, and 50 Texas counties have passed resolutions declaring an invasion,” according to the report.

“What many people fail to comprehend is that Texas is facing a real threat to the safety and security of our citizens,” Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told the Center Square. “This is not an immigration policy debate playing out but a constitutional threat to the sovereignty of Texas.”

The border crisis is gobbling up billions more dollars in lodging costs for illegals, the report notes. Sanctuary city New York City alone has spent more than $1 billion housing the influx of immigrants. And the health care system, public schools and social service agencies are facing unanticipated costs in caring for illegal aliens. A House committee report earlier this year on the impact of illegal immigrants on social services asserts nearly 60 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants “use one or more major welfare programs.”

‘Flames Have Spread’

The long list of victims include illegal immigrants themselves. In fiscal year 2022, according to the report, a record 853 foreign nationals died attempting to cross the southwest border. That number includes the deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history when 53 people, including eight children, were “cooked alive” in a tractor-trailer beneath the San Antonio sun. 

Last year, there were more than 8,000 migrant deaths recorded on migratory routes worldwide, the deadliest year in history, according to the Migration Data Portal. 

Sadly, the report asserts, the invasion has been carried out in the name of naked politics. America is much less safe because Democrats under Biden-Harris have attempted to harvest the next crop of leftist voters. The regime has fought tooth and nail against legislation like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote. As The Federalist has reported, Virginia recently removed more than 6,300 foreign nationals from its voter rolls. Texas did the same, clearing potentially 6,500-plus noncitizens from its voter database.

The white paper calls for passage of the Secure the Border Act, not the failed Senate bill Biden and Harris have pressed for that lawmakers have called a “joke.” As critics note, among the many warts of the “deal” is the fact that it would commit to law up to 5,000 border crossings per day before the president shuts down the border. 

“Radical progressive Democrats have caused the worst border crisis in recent history, and the flames have spread to almost every state and locality in the nation. This crisis is rooted in a fundamental desire to remake and cement one party rule built on dependence on the state,” the report states. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.