Unlike President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris has at least visited the southern border — once. Unfortunately, as evidenced by her embarrassing appearance on Meet the Press this weekend, Harris does not appear to have learned anything from her trip. When asked, Harris confidently assured host Chuck Todd that “the border is secure.”
No, madam, it is not.
When Harris visited the border last June, a then-record 180,597 immigrants had been arrested the month before for illegally entering the country. More than a million immigrants would end up getting caught, mostly turning themselves in on purpose, in Biden’s first year. A record 241,166 immigrants were arrested this May, and more than 2 million will be caught this year. In other words, the border is far from secure, and the problem is getting worse.
Last year, an additional 500,000 immigrants are estimated to have sneaked across the border illegally without capture. This year, that number is expected to approach 1 million. We have no idea who these people are, what other crimes they have committed or are committing, or what they intend to do in the United States. Harris thinks this is fine — “the border is secure.”
The number of immigrants found dead near the border has also skyrocketed under Biden. In 2020, just 247 immigrants were found dead while trying to cross. In Biden’s first year, that number rose to 557. This year, it is already 750 and is on pace for more than 1,000. Biden’s border of death is so bad that fire departments in border communities have had to buy new refrigerators to store all the bodies.
Biden’s border crisis didn’t cause the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, but it did contribute to the botched response. According to the investigation by the Texas House investigative committee, since Biden became president, there have been 47 “secure” or “lockdown” events in Uvalde schools. Approximately 90% of those lockdowns were due to “bailouts” in which illegal immigrants evading law enforcement at high speeds crash and then abandon their cars on foot. “The series of bailout-related alerts led teachers and administrators to respond to all alerts with less urgency,” the report concluded. “When they heard the sound of an alert, many assumed that it was another bailout.”
The security crisis at our southern border is entirely of Biden’s making. As a candidate, Biden told immigrants thinking of illegally crossing our border, “You should come.” On his first day in office, Biden ended former President Donald Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, which deterred immigrants from turning themselves in to the Border Patrol. Under the policy, asylum applicants from third countries had to wait in Mexico until their asylum cases were finalized. Instead of returning immigrants to Mexico, Biden releases them into the U.S., where they are free to roam indefinitely — their asylum cases, the vast majority of which will be denied, take years to resolve.
Also on his first day, Biden softened Trump’s Title 42 policy, by which the former president had begun returning all migrants to Mexico due to COVID-19 without any chance to file for asylum. Biden immediately stopped applying Title 42 to unaccompanied minors. Months later, he ended the policy for adults traveling with children, too. As a direct result, the number of immigrants turning themselves in at the border skyrocketed.
Harris’s solution to all of this is mind-boggling. Before claiming the border was secure, Harris told Todd that “there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do, the first request we made: Pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship.”
But an offer of amnesty can only make the problem worse. It will encourage millions more to come here illegally. It’s almost as if Harris wants the situation at the southern border to get worse.
The Democratic Party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. Republicans are powerless to stop the invasion at the southern border. But if Republicans take the House, or the House and the Senate, they must use the power of the purse to force Biden to change his border policies. Otherwise, more immigrants will come, more immigrants will die, more chaos will spread at the southern border, and Kamala Harris will smile and tell us the border is still secure.
