With the ongoing border crisis at the top of voter’s minds as the November election looms in 11 weeks, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s party formally endorsed a highly controversial measure that would provide blanket citizenship to millions of unvetted and undocumented individuals and hamper efforts to deport criminals. Experts say that Harris’s border policies would almost certainly mirror President Joe Biden’s if elected and will further exacerbate the crisis.
An Economist/YouGov poll released last week revealed that 54% of voters rated “immigration” as one of the most important issues facing the nation. The results largely mirror previous survey results, which have found that the unprecedented flood of individuals being permitted to enter the country under the Biden-Harris administration’s policies is the most concerning issue for most voters.
Concerns over open border policies are likely to be further heightened in the wake of a new report released Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that up to 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children are unaccounted for. Studies show that “75%-80% of unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are victims of human trafficking.”
In response, Harris and Biden have begun messaging more frequently on the border crisis in recent months. During the first day of the Democratic National Convention on Monday, Biden claimed that as a result of his executive action, “border encounters have dropped over 50%. In fact, there are fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office.”
But as Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, observed during Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” the president is leaving out key information from this statistic.
“[T]he Biden administration … implemented an unlawful parole program where they actually fly individuals from four different countries — over about 30,000 a month into the country,” he pointed out. “So … they’re not apprehended by Border Patrol. … You actually have to look at three different data sets to get a full grasp of the situation along that border. And what President Biden mentioned … is only one data set, and he’s giving you the lowest data set. He has to show that somehow the numbers have decreased. But if you look at everything that’s going on and all the changes that they have made, that 56,000 number that he may have mentioned is actually 170,000 for the month of July. That is an astronomically high number. The border crisis remains at a historic level along that border, despite what the president and the vice president want you to believe.”
Wolf, who currently serves as executive director of the Center for Homeland Security & Immigration at the America First Policy Institute, went on to emphasize the full scope of illegal border crossings that have occurred under the Biden-Harris administration. “[T]hey can cherry pick one month over the course of almost three and a half years, but what the data shows is that … upwards of nine to 10 million individuals have crossed that border illegally. And if you look at all four years of the Trump administration, it was around two million. And I think that tells you everything that you need to know.”
Wolf further remarked that the administration’s messaging on the border has seen a noticeable shift in recent months.
“It’s this game that they’ve played now for three and a half years, which is trying to convince the American people that nothing’s going on [at] that border,” he noted. “For two and a half years … they refused to call it a crisis. Remember, they kept saying it’s just a ‘challenge.’ It’s not a crisis. Well, somehow at the beginning of this year, in an election year, President Biden all of a sudden started calling it a crisis, right? … [T]his has been the mantra of this administration: ‘Let’s ignore what’s going on in the border. Let’s try to gaslight and convince the American people they’re not seeing what they’re actually seeing with their own eyes. And then at the end of that, let’s try to blame Republicans that it’s somehow their fault.’”
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris has said little if anything regarding the border crisis since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee following Biden’s exit from the race in July. Her campaign website currently makes no mention of her stance on immigration or any other policy proposals. On Monday, the Democratic National Convention voted to approve their 2024 party platform. Regina Romero, the co-chair of the convention platform committee, told the Associated Press that the platform “included input from all corners of the party,” presumably including Harris.
As noted by Wolf, the platform explicitly endorses the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, a highly controversial unpassed bill, as a way of addressing the border crisis.
“It’s so radical that [it] did not even get a vote in Congress when controlled by Democrats,” he explained. “[The bill calls for] a path to citizenship for almost the entire illegal alien population in the U.S., probably over 15 million individuals, and that includes individuals that were removed or deported under President Trump. They would actually bring them back into the country at taxpayer expense. Why? … They don’t say — you can only imagine.”
Wolf further detailed that the bill “makes it very difficult” to remove illegal immigrants who have committed felonies. “They actually say in the bill it has to be an aggravated felony. So it’s not enough that [they] committed burglary. You’ve got to do it with a weapon. It’s got to be an aggravated crime of some sort. It’s just crazy. It also reduces or eliminates the bars to re-entry. So if an illegal alien gets caught and removed, they’re prohibited from coming back into the country for three or 10 years. It removes that completely. There is no consequence to their illegal behavior. It allows them to come right back in almost immediately.”
In addition, Wolf outlined how the bill stipulates that undocumented individuals receive a Social Security number, “which makes it far easier to get a driver’s license and to be registered in that state’s voter registration file as well. So [it’s] making it easier for those illegal aliens to [vote].”
Wolf concluded by noting that Harris has strongly opposed Republican legislation that would strengthen border security. “[T]he vice president has been against H.R. 2, which is a very strong border security bill. [Instead] she is for … this radical bill that does all these different things that allow more and more individuals to come into the country and makes it more difficult to remove them. I just think that is the wrong policy approach for these times.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
