by Frank Holmes, reporter
In the war against illegal immigration, the Biden administration just quietly threw away the U.S. Border Patrol’s best weapon.
After a months-long legal battle, President Joe Biden has gotten rid of one of the few things that had been working: The Biden administration announced it would do away with the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” Policy.
The enforcement mechanism, technically known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), let Border Patrol agents remove tens of thousands of would-be asylum seekers who illegally crossed the southern border, saying they had to stay in Mexico during their application process.
Biden erased the MPP on Monday. “DHS is committed to ending the court-ordered implementation of MPP in a quick, and orderly, manner,” said the Department of Homeland Security in a statement released Monday. From now on, people would no longer be signed up for the MPP, and the thousands who had been enrolled in it would gradually be brought to the United States to apply for asylum in person.
“Individuals are no longer being newly enrolled into MPP, and individuals currently in MPP in Mexico will be disenrolled when they return for their next scheduled court date. Individuals disenrolled from MPP will continue their removal proceedings in the United States,” the DHS said.
Biden had suspended the MPP, which kept 70,000 illegal immigrants out of the United States, on his first day in office: January 20, 2021. Then he tried to abolish the protocols completely—but U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that Biden hadn’t gone through the process properly, so he had to keep the protocols in place.
Last December, Biden announced he would put the MPP back to work—but critics said it was eyewash: Border Patrol agents only used MPP to keep 5,764 illegal aliens out of the U.S. The Trump administration had used the policy to remove more than 20-times as many people.
“In the first 17 full months of Biden’s presidency, U.S. border officials have stopped 3.1 million people attempting to cross the southern border illegally,” The Washington Examiner reported. During the Trump administration, about 100,000 illegal immigrants a month crossed the border; that number has almost doubled under Biden’s watch.
But Monday, Judge Kacsmaryk ruled that the Biden administration had jumped through all the bureaucratic hurdles necessary to eliminate the MPP from the books—and Biden immediately did so.
The DHS paraphrased secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying that “MPP has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border.”
But critics say the problem is the protocols, which Trump put in place in 2019, worked too well.
“Joe Biden’s policies have ushered in the largest increase in illegal migration in history,” wrote Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “Border Patrol has already set a new record for migrant apprehensions at the Southwest border in FY 2021, but that record will fall (with two reporting months yet to go) when July’s apprehension numbers are published in mid-August.”
That’s opened up huge vulnerabilities for the United States—including drugs, human smuggling, even potential terrorism.
When Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked “How easy would it be for a group of terrorists to intermingle themselves in this wave of illegal immigrants and be able to sneak into our country to kill a bunch of us?”
FBI Director Christopher Wray responded, “It’s certainly something we’re concerned about.”
It certainly should be.
“Nearly 40 percent of the migrants apprehended at the Southwest border thus far in FY 2022 (more than 644,500 individuals) aren’t from Mexico or the ‘Northern Triangle’ countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras,” wrote Arthur. “They are ‘long-distance’ migrants who have gone to great trouble and expense to enter illegally, and thousands are from countries like Russia and China with interests inimical to the United States.”
Add this move to Biden’s attempt to rescind Title 42 — which lets Border Patrol agents remove illegal aliens on the grounds that they might spread COVID-19 — and it seems like making America more susceptible to terrorism is the president’s goal.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”