The crisis at the southern border may not be grabbing as much media attention as it once did, but that doesn’t mean that it’s getting any better.
A new report shows how the situation continues to deteriorate. In December, Border Patrol agents detained 178,840 migrants, a grim record.
That figure is more than double the worst December on record for illegal crossing attempts.
The New York Post called out both the Biden administration and the media in a scathing editorial noting that many of those detained aren’t sent home.
Instead, the administration is “quietly resettling” them around the nation.
“The only White House strategy here, in other words, is to try keeping the crisis out of the headlines while sending as few illegal crossers as possible home,” the editorial said.
“And never mind the joke of Vice President Kamala Harris’ mission to tackle the supposed ‘root causes’ in the Southern Triangle nations, which are actually providing a shrinking share of the surge as the news that you’ll likely get away with it spreads across Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Along with the record-setting detentions in December, numbers from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection show more than 1.7 million arrests, detentions and other enforcement actions at the border for the 2021 fiscal year.
That’s more than triple the 458,000 recorded for fiscal year 2020.
Those numbers may have been artificially reduced due to the effects of the pandemic and massive global shutdowns.
But last year’s figure also far exceeds the 977,000 recorded in 2019, the most recent pre-pandemic year.
There appears to be no end in sight, with more than half a million arrests and other other enforcement actions in the past three months alone.
That’s not just a political disaster for the Biden administration.
It’s taking a real toll on the border communities forced to cope with the surge.
Fox 10 Phoenix reports that encounters in Yuma, Arizona, are up 2,000 percent since 2020 – and it’s crushing local services, with hospitals overwhelmed by those who crossed on foot and are in need of care, as well as pregnant women who crossed illegally so they can give birth in the United States.
One local official told the station there’s a solution: finishing the partially completed sections of the border wall in the area.
“There are 52 gates in the Yuma sector that are not constructed that are open,” Mayor Douglas Nicholls told Fox. “Some are highly used. If we can get that blocked up and part of that wall finished, it will help give Border Patrol a fighting chance.”
While the wall might seem like a lost cause given the Biden administration’s opposition, Nicholls said there’s still a chance it could happen.
“Those discussions have been very positive,” he said.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is in court attempting to defend the Trump-era policies that it once claimed to oppose.
Biden railed against Trump’s border policies as a candidate, but as Vox noted this week, his Justice Department attorneys are currently arguing that separating migrant families is a perfectly legal policy – and that the government doesn’t have to pay out a settlement to those impacted.
Biden’s DOJ is also arguing that the pandemic-related restrictions on border crossings and immigration imposed by Trump are legal as well.
Vox wrote that Biden’s very mixed message – railing against Trump’s policies in public, and defending them in court – “makes it hard to take Biden’s stated commitment to immigration reform seriously.”
The NY Post was even more blunt.
“Biden claims his first year brought historic achievements, and it did,” the editorial stated. “Record illegal immigration; record inflation; a record bugout in Afghanistan — in all, record cluelessness.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.