Will Spiraling Border Crisis Destroy Biden’s Presidency?

I&I Editorial

It’s not three months into a four-year term, but Joe Biden’s presidency is already heading for the rocks. Surging waves of immigrants have overwhelmed the U.S.’ southern border. With public anger growing, Biden now has been forced to tacitly recognize President Donald Trump’s border success.

Just this week, Biden let it be known he’s considering restarting Trump’s border wall construction — just to “fill in” parts of it, his administration says. Right.

In fact, it’s desperation because the Biden-Democrat open border policy has been an epic disaster, one that could result in huge Democratic losses in 2022 and a lame-duck presidency for Biden.

An AP-NORC poll shows 56% of those queried disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration and 55% disapprove of his border security policies. Significantly, this is a glaring weak spot in Biden’s otherwise solid support from independents, who disapprove of his policies cited above by 62% and 67%, respectively.

Americans have been shocked by images such as this touching video on Wednesday of a lone crying boy left behind by his group to wander the Mexican desert near the border. That’s Biden’s policy in a nutshell.

And, sadly, it’s entirely predictable.

Illegal border crossings surged to a 15-year high in March, with 171,000 illegal crossers taken into custody, along with more than 19,000 unaccompanied kids.

The media likened Trump to Hitler when the number of kids in detention under his policies hit 2,600. Now that the number of kids detained is 19,000 and rising, the Big Media refuse to blame Biden. Because, you know, Trump.

The federal government can’t even handle the people arriving. NASA (!) is now asking its employees to take in immigrants, while the federal Office of Personnel Management has requested clearly underemployed bureaucrats from across the government to voluntarily relocate to the border to help out.

The Daily Signal provides a handy compendium of Biden’s new border policies and the damage they’ve wrought less than 100 days into his presidency:

Biden stopped construction of the border wall immediately after his inauguration Jan. 20, costing taxpayers $6 million per day by one estimate. 

Biden also ended the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which allowed officials to return asylum-seekers to Mexico as their claims were adjudicated in U.S. immigration courts, the webinar participants noted. 

And Biden ended Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Central American countries and promised amnesty and family unification in the United States. He ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to deport illegal immigrants for the first 100 days. 

Border Patrol agents reportedly have been arresting 4,500 to 6,000 migrants per day, with the Biden administration quickly processing and releasing them into the U.S.”

We’re now at a level of illegal immigration roughly six times what President Barack Obama called a “crisis.” Please remember that when the Democrats and their far-left open-border allies start screaming “it’s not a crisis!”

Making all this worse, the slapdash nature of non-enforcement is such that many illegals are being discharged without any proper records even to account for their whereabouts.

“The rapid releases ease pressure on the Border Patrol and its badly overcrowded holding facilities but shifts work to Immigration and Customs and Enforcement, the agency that enforces immigration laws within the United States,” the AP reports. “Families are released with booking records — when they get paperwork at all — though only parents are photographed and fingerprinted.”

As if that weren’t bad enough, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, those who do get documents are in essence being granted a right to stay here. Thousands are being given renewable permits so they can apply for asylum, which can take years. Meanwhile, they’re allowed to apply for Social Security cards, giving them access to welfare benefits and jobs.

Oh, and don’t forget, access to voting. A Social Security card is a magic carpet to many things, including drivers licenses and, yes, also ballots. Which is the elephant in the room of this whole debate.

Just five months ago, our border was tight and secure. Those who came here illegally were apprehended and forced to wait in Mexico. There were no wailing children wandering the desert alone, and Mexican drug cartels’ human-trafficking operations were starved for business.

Today, the border is a disaster, and Democrats are desperately backpedaling on their earlier support for Biden’s radical policy shift. Even Mexico’s socialist president has lauded Trump and blamed Biden for the crisis, which required Mexico to dispatch troops to its border to keep order as the cartels run amok.

Given rising voter anger, don’t be surprised if Biden’s “advisers” force him to moonwalk away from his foolish and inhumane border policies. If not, in a little less than two years a newly elected Republican Congress might force President Kamala Harris to do the job instead.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board