President Joe Biden checked a box on Sunday. In a transparent attempt to silence a growing chorus of criticism about his failure to get a firsthand look at the state of the border – where over 5 million have illegally entered under his watch – the president finally deigned to take three hours out of his weekend getaway in Delaware to visit El Paso.
With the turn of the calendar and the unofficial start of the 2024 campaign cycle, President Biden took two steps designed to quell the growing furor over his handling of the raging, self-inflicted border crisis.
At the mid-point of President Biden’s term in office, some 5.5 million migrants have illegally crossed our southern border and made their way into almost every community across the United States. No longer able to deny that more than a quarter of a million illegal migrants a month is a problem – much less a crisis – the administration began 2023 by taking steps to cover up the magnitude of the problem.
Even in a nation that includes the principle of separation of church and state in its founding document, for centuries our political leaders have often heeded the counsel of religious leaders on important moral issues of the day. But religious leaders, like politicians, have had a mixed record when it comes to being on the right side of history. The antebellum South had more than its share of pastors who found justification in Scripture for maintaining slavery. Father Charles Coughlin was perhaps the most prominent American Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s.
Thirty-two months and nearly 9 million illegal border crossings (including “gotaways”) into President Biden’s term in office, his administration has finally acknowledged that there is a crisis at our border. On October 5, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it will waive 26 laws to “install additional physical barriers and roads (including the removal of obstacles to detection of illegal entrants) … to deter illegal crossings in areas of ‘high illegal entry’ into the United States”
Israel’s expected ground offensive in Gaza has yet to begin, but we are already hearing calls for the Biden administration to welcome Gaza residents to the United States using immigration parole authority. Doing so, in the midst of an already raging migration crisis, would be both illegal and ill-conceived.