President Joe Biden did a wicked thing this week, and he probably figured that he could hide it behind the smoke from the implosion of the Republican Party at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
With the American people distracted by the efforts by 20 Republican insurgents to deny the speaker’s gavel to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), this was an opportune time for the White House to unveil a crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border that would make any GOP immigration hardliner proud.
McCarthy is in trouble with fellow Republicans who find the 57-year-old from Central California unlikable, uninspiring, and untrustworthy. And at the same time, Biden is showing everyone that he can be all those things when it comes to cracking down on immigrants and refugees.
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All Biden had to do was betray and backtrack. He was able to con the Latinos who voted for him, because they were desperate to be rescued from the regime of former President Donald Trump. Biden said often on the stump that, if elected president, his administration’s immigration system would be “safe, orderly, and humane.”
But the immigration plan that the president announced this week—which appears to have been sketched out by the Department of Homeland Security—is none of those things. Instead, the measures are arbitrary, cruel, and racist.
The two code words of the Biden plan are “expand” and “expedite.” The idea is to expand the president’s power to expedite the removal of migrants and refugees deemed undesirable.
Biden made plain that how a migrant or refugee is treated by U.S. immigration policy will be determined not by personal circumstances, or the merit of their asylum claim, but by the country they come from—and by extension the color of their skin.
Immigrants warm to a fire at dawn after spending the night outside next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence on December 22, 2022 in El Paso, Texas.
John Moore/GettyUnder the Biden plan, if you arrive from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Haiti, your chances of even getting before an immigration judge to plead your case for asylum have just been severely limited. A total of 30,000 visas per month will be allotted per country, but those who want to receive them—and be “paroled” into the United States—will need to be vetted and get the blessing of a U.S. sponsor. Anyone from those countries who tries to enter the United States once the allotment is exhausted is out of luck. They will be immediately deported to Mexico without so much as a hearing.
It’s all part of the administration’s efforts to expand Title 42. That’s the provision of the U.S. code created by a 1944 public health law that Trump invoked during the COVID-19 pandemic to severely curtail migrant border crossings. Biden promised to end Title 42 while campaigning for president. Once elected, he changed his mind and kept it for nearly two years until a federal judge struck it down. Last month, the Supreme Court ordered that Title 42 remain in place.
Notice that none of the people threatened with expedited removal to Mexico—not Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, or Haitians—are actually from Mexico. Our southern neighbor is just the closest and most convenient place to dump these desperate human beings, who will then be on their own to figure out their next move. According to The Washington Post, U.S. officials insist that the Mexican government has agreed to take in an additional 30,000 migrants from each of those four countries every month.
Oddly, the Biden policy doesn’t seek to limit the entry of people from countries like Sweden, Germany, Canada, or Norway. Also, as a sign of the times, there is no attempt to limit the entry of light-skinned refugees from Ukraine or Russia. Instead, now that both are lining up in Tijuana just eight miles south of San Diego with hopes of entering the United States, the administration appears eager to roll out the red carpet. You may recall that last year Biden pledged to take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.
Biden claims that these new restrictions will end the current crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. We can expect that to be the message he takes with him to El Paso on Sunday, when he visits the epicenter of the border chaos. It will be the first visit that Biden has paid to the border, an area it’s obvious he knows very little about—with no desire to learn more.
While Biden is in “El Chuco” (as the West Texas border city is called by locals), maybe he’ll bump into the woman from Venezuela who told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News that she doesn’t want to hurt our country, only to contribute to it while starting a new life.
A US flag waves at the San Ysidro crossing port in the US-Mexico border seen from Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on December 19, 2022.
GUILLERMO ARIAS/GettyAre these the people we’re so terrified of?
Biden’s border shenanigans make me almost miss the good old days of Donald Trump. The former president may have pursued a nativist agenda, but at least he came right out with it. You knew who and what he was.
Heck, on that day in June 2015 when Trump announced that he was running for president, he pretty much labeled my Mexican grandfather a rapist and drug trafficker. So much of Trump’s presidency was disgusting and profane, and his immigration policies set that tone.
But at least I didn’t have to constantly watch my back and wait for the next betrayal, the way I do with Biden.
We’re in uncharted territory, folks. Until last week, the worst thing one could say about Joe Biden on the topic of immigration is that he served as vice president to a former president—Barack Obama—who deported three million people and put Central American refugees in cages. Or maybe one could make the argument that Biden is just as bad as Trump—because the 46th president was fixing Trump’s border wall, preserving Title 42, and expanding a “Remain in Mexico” policy that he had also promised to end.
Now, everything has changed. Biden is in a class by himself. With his new immigration crackdowns, he has gone beyond the Trump policies.
As presidents go, Biden is the top immigration restrictionist in modern U.S. history. Worse, some of his most dubious policies seem to be at least partially driven by race.
Remember this the next time you hear the left accusing Republicans of being thick-headed racists when it comes to immigration. A Democratic president, and the leader of the party, just surrendered the moral high ground on the issue—not for a generation or two, but forever.
