Too Little, Too Late?
In the past month there have been three separate instances that have shown the increasing concern that Biden’s security officials and the president himself have had with the flood of illegal border crossings the U.S. has experienced during his term.
This realization started with a leaked report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General Joseph Cuffari where he dinged the agency for its failure to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have been released into the United States under the Biden administration. Cuffari found that between March and September of 2021 alone, that about 30 percent of those captured “did not comply with release terms,” or in plain English, failed to show up for hearings which will determine their fate as residents of the U.S. Moreover, DHS does not even have addresses for these folks, even if they were inclined to actually look for them.
Adding to the concern, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that the U.S.-Mexico border’s staggering number of illegal crossings are a danger to national security. He testified, “I certainly know that it is an eclectic mix of nationalities and the volume is just staggering, to me it represents a significant security issue and represents a wide array of criminal threats that flow out of it.” Wray continued, “while on the one hand, we don’t have any imminent credible threat from a foreign terrorist organization on the border at the moment, any port of entry, any potential vulnerability is something we know foreign terrorist organizations and others will seek to exploit.”
What we can draw from these statements is that the main agencies responsible for keeping our country safe from invaders are both sounding the alarm. They are warning there is a “significant security issue” at the border and data is not “consistently documented” as to who is piercing our borders at any given moment. Perhaps the marriage of these two grave concerns is why the Biden administration decided to make new additions to the border wall – something Biden halted when he signed an executive order in the early days of his term. Or perhaps they see the situation unfolding, see public opinion shifting against them, and are making whatever last ditch efforts they can to save Sen. Mark Kelly’s seat before midterms (did I mention Biden’s only building the wall in Arizona?) This should be a signal to the American people that the crisis at the border has a different level of urgency in the administration’s eyes than what they are letting on.
To be clear, Biden and his team finally noticing an issue and doing something to prevent the crisis is a very welcome policy switch, although it is probably for purely political reasons. As far as the state of the country is concerned one can only wonder, is this shift too little too late?