Joseph R. Biden (reminder: still the president of the United States) will leave office in a month, leaving behind a legacy of achievements and failures, as all presidents do.
Nowhere has his footprint been greater than on the issue of borders and immigration. History will judge more clearly with the perspective of time exactly what Biden has wrought. But here’s my quick take on his immediate legacy on our national security.
Crime and No Punishment
This deserves many lengthier analyses, some of which I’ve already written. Our major cities, all run by elected Democrats, are already reeling from the effects of leftist “rogue” prosecutors like New York’s Alvin Bragg, Los Angeles’ George Gascon, and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner. Driven by woke ideology, these elected top cops chose not to prosecute many recidivist criminals, including those suffering from mental illness. Instead, they released Them onto streets and subways, where they continue to present a significant risk to others.
Compounding the native-born criminals are thousands of illegal aliens released at the border or paroled within the United States by Biden’s accomplice, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. They are cut loose by the Department of Homeland Security despite us having no confirmation of their identity or knowledge of their criminal history back home.
I warned about Tren de Aragua a year ago. Close to half of U.S. states are now feeling the presence of this nightmarish gang of violent criminals. We need a nationwide federal effort, aided by state and local law enforcement, to root them out. Even with that, many of these thugs will be wreaking havoc for years to come.
There are too many individual examples of American lives ended or neighborhoods blighted by aliens who should not be here—robberies in New York, killer drunk drivers in Detroit, religious minorities shot by fanatics in Chicago, and increased crime and overtaxed police forces in cities and towns across the nation. Each such incident lowers the sense of national public safety.
Crumbling Cities
Democrat mayors like New York’s Eric Adams, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, and Boston’s Michelle Wu have forced taxpayers in their states to house, feed, educate, and care for tens of thousands of illegal migrants—many sent to their cities with federal assistance. They expected a federal bailout from Biden’s White House, and they did get billions while he was in office. But why would Donald Trump, with Republicans holding both houses in Congress, continue to financially support “sanctuary” cities and states that are aiding mass illegal immigration?
El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican border, has only survived being a transit point for illegal migration by tapping into federal cash from a friendly administration—at least $40 million to the city, and more directly to nonprofits that are enriched by illegal migration. With Trump, that funding will dry up.
“I don’t see the funding available going forward whatsoever,” Democrat El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said.
Me neither. Not for El Paso, nor Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, or any other city that welcomed inadmissible migrants with no limits. The American public voted against mass illegal migration, and they surely won’t vote to keep throwing good money after bad.
Executive Arrogance
Biden’s worst legacy has been the way he ignored or subverted law, custom, and restraint in pursuit of his globalist ideology. Just as he did with “forgiving” student loans, Biden simply bypassed the law and arrogated authority. He used immigration parole, a tool meant for a few special cases a year, to facilitate mass illegal migration, laundering it under the labels “safe, orderly migration” and “expanded lawful pathways.” He shielded aliens from due process by handing out “temporary protected status” inconsistent with its intended purpose. His Department of Homeland Security used “administrative closure” to shelve thousands of immigration cases and avoid making decisions on asylum.
Mayorkas threw administrative roadblocks in front of his enforcement officers to make their work almost impossible. Even where decisions to deport an alien after due process had been made, they sometimes “deferred enforced departure”— a deliberate decision not to carry out the court order to deport. Biden moved decision-making on many cases from experienced immigration judges to U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officers, encouraging ideological bias, less scrutiny, and more fraud.
The list of ways in which Biden’s presidency set back both the rule of law and timely due process in immigration law is too long for this article, but he surely sets a historical record.
We know the myth of Pandora, the Greek girl who opened a box of evils that she could never put back. Biden opened a Pandora’s box of executive overreach that needs to be shut by Congress to avoid this ever happening again. Congress needs to pass a law like last year’s Secure the Border Act that would discourage future executives from following Biden’s lawless example.
Setback to National Immigration Policy
Biden’s final legacy is that the public has soured, for now at least, on what should be a great success story—American immigration. He and his cabinet lumped together legal and illegal immigration, using euphemisms and Orwellian “newspeak” to attempt to dumb us all down. Not all illegal immigrants are sympathetic “refugees” or “asylum-seekers.” Calling someone “undocumented” gives us little clue as to their actual status. Are they illegal aliens, or did they simply leave their passports and visas in the hotel safe? “Noncitizen” is a useless term that encompasses foreign ambassadors, agricultural workers from Mexico, lawful permanent residents of the United States, and Venezuelan gang members released at the border. “Lawful pathways” include parole, which is arguably unlawful and leads nowhere, as it can be revoked at any time. No wonder the public is confused.
Our legal immigration system does need reform to put American economic interests ahead of outdated notions of refugee and family reunification, as this Heritage Foundation report argues. But major changes to our current system will not gain enough public support until voters know that the existing laws will be respected, not ignored or circumvented. For someone who repeatedly said no one was above the law, often in reference to Donald Trump, Biden violated the law flagrantly and regularly.
From Biden’s legacy of ashes at the border, we need to see a phoenix rise: an immigration policy that puts America first, respects borders and nations, and rejects globalist dictates that respect neither.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Read Other BorderLine Columns:
When Can Government Deport Foreign Students for Pro-Hamas Protests?
Could Biden Ignore the Law Yet Again to Bring a Million Gazans to the US?
Sanctuary Cities—A Dangerous Game We All Lose
How Trump Reverses the Destruction Biden’s Pro-Illegal Immigration Ideologues Wrought
To Have a Serious Talk About Immigration, You’ve Got to First Debunk the Myths
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