So much for a Biden border crackdown. Already, people on the ground are calling the president’s “fix” a joke, pointing to the 10,000 migrants in custody from last Thursday — four times the phony limit set by the White House. “And the inflows keep coming,” The New York Post editorial board wrote in collective disgust. Barely a week in and “Biden’s BS border move has already failed,” they argue.
The supposed “crackdown” is “a total fake,” the editors insist — and the last few days seem to prove it. In the southwest, Border Patrol announced an apprehension rate of 2,600 in just three sectors (San Diego, Tucson, and Del Rio). Look, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) told reporters, we all know this order is a joke. “This executive order will do nothing but further an invasion into our country, inviting thousands of unvetted illegal immigrants to cross the border every single day — the exact opposite of shutting down the border.”
Worse, he points out, the policy “essentially legalizes the millions of illegal immigrants already in our country and allows thousands more to illegally cross our southern border daily.”
Even the president’s media cheerleaders are panning the administration’s insincere response. On ABC’s “This Week,” host Martha Raddatz was openly incredulous with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, insisting that it was “very hard” to call President Biden’s actions at the border a “success” when 6.5 million illegal immigrants have been caught on the southern border.
And if Democrats think this lawlessness is helping them with their base, they’re mistaken. A CBS/YouGov poll from this past week showed that 62% of voters support “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally” — including a majority of Hispanics (53%) and almost 40% of the president’s party. Former President Donald Trump played to that strength during a campaign stop in Phoenix on Thursday. “Biden wants an invasion,” Trump said, “I want deportation.”
As far as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is concerned, this issue could very well be the president’s undoing. It was “interesting,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s edition of “This Week on the Hill,” that Biden had spent the last several months “assur[ing] the American people there was nothing he could do.” And yet, “On many occasions I met with the president,” the speaker explained. “I read him the legal authorities [he has]. I handed him a summary of all the executive action that he could take under the existing federal statutes to solve the crisis that he himself created. Remember,” he pointed out, “we documented 64 specific executive actions that Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas took … to open the border wide. They did it intentionally,” Johnson argued. “And for him to now feign as though he’s concerned about [it] … that he wants to fix it is just pure politics.”
How do we know that? Because, as Johnson and others point out, what Biden did won’t solve the problem. In fact, the speaker insists, “it might actually make it worse … because he’s now sent the signal that if you’re among the first 2,500 illegals every day, you get a free pass. … The whole policy is crazy.” It does not, as he highlighted, end the catch-and-release program or reinstate Trump’s hugely effective Remain in Mexico policy. “It has created a catastrophe for the country that we are going to be dealing with for decades. [And] now, just a few weeks before the first debate and on the eve of the election … he wants to be able to go out and tell people that, ‘Oh, gosh, I tried to do something.’” And yet, Johnson went on, “he won’t ever acknowledge that he is the one that created the catastrophe.”
Now his party is divided, the speaker warned, because they’ve effectively created an “open borders caucus.” Worse, his campaign is dealing with the political fallout of openly defying federal law. “He has a real problem,” Johnson said of Biden. “This past week I was in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin doing events. [The crowds] are not [just] normal Republican voters. They’re new people,” the Louisiana leader explained. It’s all part of the “demographic shift going on in the country” that’s pulling Hispanics, African-American voters, and the Jewish community into the GOP camp.
“[T]they see no alternative,” Johnson pointed out. “They understand that Joe Biden has wrecked the country and turned his back on their interest and their security and their ability to put groceries on the table. All these things are going to have a huge effect in November. And I think … the Republican Party is going to have a great election year.”
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
