If Biden really cared about securing the southern border and stopping the smuggling and trafficking that ruin lives, he would direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to arrest more border criminals instead of releasing them.
Instead, despite the fact that the nation is facing its biggest border crisis to date, ICE arrested and deported fewer people in the 2021 fiscal year than in prior years due to the Biden administration’s increasingly lax border security policies.
Customs and Border Protection made at least 2 million arrests in the 2021 calendar year, but ICE arrested only 74,082 illegal border crossers in the 2021 fiscal year and deported approximately 59,011 under direct orders from the Biden administration.
In previous years when illegal migration was down significantly under former President Donald Trump’s strict border security initiatives, ICE made far more arrests and deportations. In 2020, before President Joe Biden assumed office, ICE made 103,603 arrests and 185,884 removals. In In 2019, ICE agents arrested 143,099 illegal migrants and deported 267,258.
The decrease in necessary arrests and deportations is a direct result of Biden’s open border policies. It wasn’t until Biden began his tenure in the White House that ICE stopped enforcing the border security that so many Americans crave and gave the administration what it wanted.
“We have fundamentally changed immigration enforcement in the interior,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on CBS News in January. “For the first time ever, our policy explicitly states that a non-citizen’s unlawful presence in the United States will not, by itself, be a basis for the initiation of an enforcement action.”
The 2021 ICE arrest numbers are devastatingly low compared to the number of people whom Customs and Border Protection agents said they encountered along the border, but they aren’t surprising. Even before he assumed office, Biden touted open border policies and promoted rewards for illegal border crossers. Shortly after he became president, Biden rescinded Trump-era border protections, and illegal crossings skyrocketed. This influx of illegal aliens who knew they faced little to no punishment for flooding the country overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and ICE facilities, which were suddenly directed to halt or slow arrests and deportations.
As a result, drug trafficking, human smuggling, and other border-related crimes increased. Fentanyl seizures went up in vulnerable border areas by 1,066 percent, and unaccompanied minors were shipped to different states via covert “ghost” flights with hardly any transparency or vetting.
In September, Mayorkas officially directed ICE agents not to arrest workers and other illegal border crossers.
“The overriding question is whether the noncitizen poses a current threat to public safety,” Mayorkas wrote.
According to the secretary and the Biden administration, who regularly smear conservatives and parents as domestic terrorists, only those whom they deem to be a threat to national security and public safety should be apprehended and deported.
Now that CBP has apprehended more than 100,000 illegal migrants at the southern border every month this calendar year, Biden suddenly wants to pretend his administration is going to prioritize border security.
During his State of the Union Address earlier this month, Biden said that things on the largely neglected southern border are going great and denied his role in exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. What he didn’t mention is that it’s under his leadership or lack thereof that things at the border took a turn for the worst.
Biden most likely won’t address the low ICE numbers and he certainly won’t take the blame for his growing border crisis, which is expected to exceed 2 million apprehensions in the 2022 fiscal year. Despite Biden’s claims, the White House’s priorities still lie in ensuring that border agents do not exercise their arrest authority.
