With Asylum Backlog Reaching 3 Million, Biden and Johnson Meet to Discuss Border Crisis

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signaled openness to making “significant change on the border” during a White House meeting with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). The news comes as reports surfaced that an unprecedented three million asylum cases are currently backlogged in U.S. immigration courts due to Biden’s porous border policies.

Despite the admission, it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will agree to Republicans’ demands for major policy changes in order to stem the tide of illegal immigrants being allowed cross over the southern border. During Wednesday’s meeting, Johnson reportedly made it clear that in order for a future border security bill to be tied to more funding for Ukraine’s war with Russia, which the White House wants, the final text must “closely parallel” HR 2, the border security bill passed by House Republicans in May. HR 2 would, among other measures, restart the construction of the border wall, increase the number of Border Patrol agents, reestablish the Remain-in-Mexico policy, and tighten restrictions on those attempting to seek asylum.

Senate Democrats and President Biden made it clear soon after HR 2 was passed that the bill had no chance of passage under their watch. But due to public and inter-party pressure, Biden is now hinting at possible openness to making border policy changes. Still, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) are pointing out that Biden’s apparent change of heart is unlikely to be genuine.

“We’re now at a point where every month, over 300,000 people are coming into our southern border, and that’s from countries all around the world,” he observed during Wednesday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “To give one example, we recently went from under 100 to over … 24,000 Chinese crossing the border. … [U]nder President Trump, when he left office, we were usually under 20,000, sometimes under 10,000 a month. Now we’ve increased that by a factor of 30.”

Grothman continued, “[T]he only way that makes sense is you want to fundamentally change and destroy America. And it’s not something they need Congress to turn around. It’s something that President Biden did all by himself by getting rid of the [Remain-in] Mexico policy. We have experts in the field that [say] President Trump could get rid of about 85% of the problem … just by sending people who are trying to cross the border back into Mexico pending a hearing. But he won’t do it.”

The congressmen went on to describe the harrowing conditions and abuse that migrants are currently experiencing at the border.

“[A]nybody who’s down on the border knows that because the drug cartels are telling everybody that now is the time to come in America, people are coming here and inevitably risking their lives, because they’re told now’s the time to come,” Grothman explained. “We see people drowning in the Rio Grande River. In the past, I’ve been in the San Diego sector and watched people drown in the Pacific Ocean as they try to get around a giant fence we have [there]. I have heard about people dehydrating to death in the Arizona desert. The number of women who are sexually assaulted is through the roof, just scandalous beyond belief. But when you have a border controlled by the drug cartels … what are you going to expect?”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of 14 House Democrats joined Republicans in formally rebuking Biden for his border policies on Wednesday. The group passed the resolution “denouncing the Biden administration’s open-borders policies, condemning the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border, and urging President Biden to end his administration’s open-borders policies.”