Biden Insults Your Intelligence With Spin on "Border Enforcement Measures"
FAIR Take | January 2023
Political spin is commonplace in Washington, particularly under the current administration, but perhaps no spin job is more insulting to the intelligence of the American people than Biden’s recent victory lap on new “border enforcement measures” leading to a decrease in unlawful border crossings.
As FAIR previously reported, Biden this month announced a massive expansion of a humanitarian parole program for up to 360,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans a year. This program, which is hardly an “enforcement measure,” was created through executive fiat without any consultation with Congress, and violates statutory limitations requiring parole to be granted temporarily, on a case-by-case basis, for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” As would-be border-crossers turn instead to Biden’s illegal parole program, one would expect a decline in illegal border crossings in the same way one would expect police to issue fewer speeding tickets if the speed limit was raised to 150 miles per hour.
A January 25 release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Public Affairs boasted that “the month of January [is] on track to see the lowest levels of monthly border encounters since February 2021.” Upon reading into this deeper, we learn the decline is entirely due to a whopping 97% month-over-month drop in aliens from those four countries – Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela – while encounters of other aliens actually increased. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas points to this as evidence “these expanded border enforcement measures are working.” However, Mayorkas is just moving the goalposts, and shouldn’t claim victory because aliens are just using a different illegal pathway that the administration unilaterally decided is lawful. This is reminiscent of the administration’s July 2022 effort to change the definition of a recession to fit their narrative when, in fact, the U.S. had already entered a recession using the commonly accepted definition. Of course then, and now, the administration feeds the spin to friendly mainstream media outlets who report it uncritically as fact.
Mayorkas also whined that it’s “incomprehensible that some states who stand to benefit from these highly effective enforcement measures are seeking to block them and cause more irregular migration at our southern border,” a nod to the lawsuit filed this week by Texas and 19 other Republican states seeking to block Biden’s expanded parole program. That comment willfully misunderstands the harm caused by the ongoing invasion: it’s not only the violence, drug trafficking, and sexual slavery that comes with unfettered border chaos (though that certainly is horrible), but also the displacement of American workers, depression of wages, spreading of public health risks, crime in the interior, and dilution of cultural cohesion that accompany mass importation of aliens with only cursory vetting. The latter impacts will still be very real with Biden’s parole program in place, and border chaos will also return as the offer of parole lures more Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans than the program can accept. Mayorkas presents the Republican states on the parole lawsuit a false choice between two bad options, without considering the reasonable alternative to secure the border and repel the invasion of illegal aliens in the first place.
Biden and Mayorkas will no doubt continue to abuse parole authority to welcome the world to our doorstep. Indeed, the aforementioned DHS release confidently asserts, “the new measures are based on the successful model previously used for individuals fleeing Venezuela, Ukraine, and Afghanistan,” which combined extended parole to about 200,000 aliens. With each successive blowout parole program, they will be more emboldened to bypass existing legal immigration pathways in pursuit of their open-borders agenda. FAIR calls on the new House Republican majority to act as a check on this abuse of power and restore sanity, integrity, and safety to the immigration system.