If President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security was proud of its record on immigration enforcement, its annual U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations report would have come out as it normally does: shortly after the fiscal year ended last September.
But Biden doesn’t want voters to know just how radically he has changed this nation’s immigration enforcement policies. So the fiscal 2021 report was delayed for months and months until its release last week. It confirmed what every immigration observer already knew: Deportations have plummeted under Biden.
Over the last 10 years, across both the Obama and Trump administrations, ICE deported between 226,000 and 410,000 illegal immigrants every year. Under Biden in fiscal year 2021, they deported just 59,000.
Even that number is misleading. The Biden DHS memo severely restricting ICE agents’ ability to arrest and deport illegal immigrants wasn’t issued until Feb. 18, 2021. More than half of the deportations that occurred in fiscal 2021 actually occurred in the first 4 1/2 months of the fiscal year under former President Donald Trump’s enforcement regimen. That means next year, when the data cover a full year of Biden enforcement policies, the deportation numbers will be substantially lower.
With COVID fading, Biden’s border crisis will only get worse. Of the more than 2 million migrants arrested after illegally crossing the southern border last year, more than half were returned to Mexico under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 public health authority.
The administration has been playing a cynical game with Title 42 ever since Biden took office. Trump first started using the measure in March 2020 to expel all migrants illegally crossing the border, but Biden got the CDC to change its order in February 2021 so that it didn’t apply to unaccompanied minors.
But remember — the entire legal justification of Title 42 was that it was needed to help stop the spread of COVID. The CDC never explained why unaccompanied children illegally crossing the border were less likely to spread COVID than adults or families. They never explained because this was a political decision. There was never any scientific analysis behind it.
Texas then sued DHS and the CDC in federal court, claiming that the CDC failed to follow federal law by not explaining why unaccompanied children were suddenly exempt from Title 42. Earlier this month, a federal court ruled in Texas’s favor but gave the Biden administration seven days before it had to end the exemption.
Then, last Friday, the CDC issued a new order recreating the exemption, saying, “After considering public health conditions and recent developments,” including the “availability and efficacy of vaccination treatments,” the expulsion of unaccompanied minors under Title 42 was “not warranted.”
But if minors illegally crossing the border are no longer a public health risk due to the availability and efficacy of COVID vaccines and treatments, then why isn’t the same true of adults and families? The CDC never explains.
Time is running out for Biden’s cynical use of Title 42 as a means to expel certain classes of migrants while preventing the deportation of others. Neither Texas and the states that want the border protected nor the open-borders activists at the American Civil Liberties Union will let Biden keep up this deception forever. Federal courts are going to force Biden to either use Title 42 on everyone or not to use it at all. And as COVID fades, it is more likely Biden will be forced to abandon Title 42 altogether.
At that point, Biden will face a tough choice on the border. Does he let every migrant who wants to apply for asylum into the country, where they will never be deported even if they lose their asylum claim? Or does he revive Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy?
Either option carries a high political price for Biden. And he completely deserves it.
*story by The Washington Examiner
