Blip in July Border Stats Highlights a Disturbing “New Normal”
From June to July 2022, apprehensions by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the southern border dropped by just under 4 percent, from 207,416 to slightly below 200,000. Normally, a decrease like this would be welcome news; less illegal immigration, like all other criminal and civil violations, is always better than more.
Unfortunately, as any American who buys gasoline can attest, a tiny decrease from unprecedented highs is hardly the relief this country desperately needs. The Biden administration’s reckless policies and careless encouragement of illegal immigration have spurred a drastic surge in the number of individuals crossing the border to almost three times the already unsustainable 2019 numbers. Even the much smaller influxes of aliens during the Trump Administration were well beyond ICE’s capacity to fulfill its legally mandated duty to detain aliens before removal or resolution of their cases. The dire “norm” the current administration’s disregard for border enforcement has created enabled 4.9 million illegal aliens to cross our border in just 18 months. This influx equates to more than the population of Louisiana or Kentucky and is completely beyond the capacity of our underfunded and deliberately incapacitated immigration enforcement system to cope with.
When gas prices began to drop last month from their destructive highs, the administration was quick to take credit. However, it seems unlikely that President Biden, “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will tout this tiny drop in crossings as a success. Doing so would require admitting that a crisis exists on the border, something the administration has been completely unwilling to acknowledge. Meanwhile, Americans will continue to bear the brunt of an influx that worsens the housing crisis in major cities, competes for scarce jobs at the beginning of a recession, and impose huge burdens on an environment already strained by overdevelopment, drought, and extreme weather.
Leaders in the “sanctuary city” of New York who’ve found their shelters completely inadequate to handle 4,000 aliens over a few weeks should be terrified at the fact that more than a thousand times that number have entered the country less than halfway into the president’s term. Major cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike are seeing social services consumed by an influx of people they cannot plan for because the federal government has ceded control over the border situation. Ultimately, local governments and the taxpayers who fund those governments and services will be on the hook for the incalculable economic and human costs of this administration’s unlawful immigration policies.
Like a struggling family watching gas prices drop a meager 20 cents as inflation skyrockets, any momentary blip in the monthly border statistics is cold comfort to a country dealing with a border crisis without precedent and entirely of the current administration’s own making.