By Jason Smith, member of Congress
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A nation without borders is not a nation. But ever since President Biden took office, he and the radical Left have worked to enact the most sweeping parts of their immigration policies, putting America on track to become the only nation in the world where anyone can freely cross the border.
The consequences of their open-border agenda are devastating. In a matter of just 18 months, our southern border has descended into complete chaos. Regular migrant caravans are crossing the Rio Grande, guided in plain sight by drug cartel “coyotes” who force migrants making a dangerous journey to pay them hefty sums to get them into our country. I find it ironic that liberal big city mayors, like Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser – who previously declared their cities to be “sanctuary cities” are now expressing concern about the number of migrants who are ending up in their communities because they don’t have the resources to care for the sheer number of people arriving.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently went as far to say the southern border is “secure.” Days before Mayorkas made his ridiculous statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – a federal agency he’s in charge of – announced that June marked the fourth consecutive month of OVER 200,000 encounters with illegal immigrants – that’s a 527% increase in apprehension compared to the last June of President Trump’s administration.
But the most concerning statistic is the number of suspected terrorists caught trying to cross our southern border. In June, an additional six illegal immigrants apprehended at the border were on the terrorist watch list, bringing the total to 56 since October 2021. That’s nearly twice as many in the previous four years combined. Just last week, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray warned that the staggering number of illegal immigrants crossing the border “represents a significant security issue and represents a wide array of criminal threats that flow out of it.” Hopefully, Biden – or whoever is in charge at the White House – won’t punish Director Wray for telling the truth about the realities our border states are facing.
On an oversight trip to the border earlier this year, I was told by Border Patrol agents that the border is secure – but only on the Mexican side. The dangerous Mexican Cartels have control of our border and are making billions of dollars smuggling humans and deadly, illegal drugs through the many open gaps in border wall. The cartels have smuggled enough fentanyl over the border in the last year alone to kill all Americans 7 times over. They are also making about $32 million a day just by trafficking humans across the southern border. In June, smugglers murdered 53 illegal immigrants by abandoning them in a locked tractor-trailer on a scorching hot day in San Antonio, Texas. Sadly, these awful tragedies will only become more common if Biden continues refusing to abandon his open-border policies.
No other president accomplished more when it comes to securing the border than Trump. What’s incredibly frustrating is that it only took a matter of weeks for Biden to erase Trump’s achievements and ignite chaos on the border. On Biden’s first day in office, he broke the law when he illegally froze resources that Congress provided in a bipartisan government funding bill for the construction of Trump’s border wall. As a result, the border wall steel – which cost hundreds of millions of dollars – lays wasting on the ground in football field size lots throughout our border states.
Biden is also fueling the crisis on the border by relentlessly pushing to end Title 42, a Trump administration policy that gives border security personnel the authority to block illegal immigrants from entering the U.S. if they pose a public health risk. And any day now, this administration is expected to completely roll back Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required most illegal immigrants to stay in Mexico until their asylum claims are heard by a U.S. court. Remain in Mexico was responsible for sending over 70,000 illegal immigrants back to Mexico to await trial in the U.S. between 2019 and 2020. Getting rid of this incredibly effective policy will further fuel the chaos on our southern border.
Biden’s Border Crisis worsens by the day, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris – who is supposedly in charge of overseeing our border security but has only visited it once – are asleep at the switch. This administration is in desperate need of oversight to expose the massive failures they have allowed on their watch, and I plan to do everything I can to ensure their failures are brought to light for every American.