Since the chaos along our southern border peaked last May, there has been a precipitous decline in the flow of Central American economic migrants posing as asylum seekers entering the country illegally. Construction of additional border fencing and stepped up enforcement by Mexico at its own southern border have certainly played a significant role in alleviating the crisis, but it is another program implemented by the Trump administration that has had the greatest impact.
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), first rolled out in January 2019, require migrants who want to seek asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico pending their immigration court hearing in the U.S.
2020 was an odd year. But 2021 may be even odder as Joe Biden will likely have to support a foreign guest worker freeze — an unimaginable concept that has now become a reality.
Last week, President Trump extended Proclamation 10052, an executive order suspending temporary foreign guest worker programs — including the H-1B and H-2B — as well as some green cards, through March.
Rather than address any element of the ongoing Biden border crisis, House Democrats spent their time moving legislation that only worsens the already grave situation at our southern border. The NO BAN Act jeopardizes our national security and public health, while the Access to Counsel Act further overwhelms our immigration courts and creates unnecessary burdens to already strained immigration authorities. Passage of both bills reveal how detached House Democrats are from properly addressing the nation’s most pressing immigration matters.
In a Jan. 22 speech, President Joe Biden not-so-boldly declared, “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Biden was selling himself short. On at least one front, America’s southern border, the administration has moved to elevate, not flatten, the COVID-19 infection curve.
In an effort to build stronger relations with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries, the Biden administration recently announced that it would spent $310 million in the region to help address the so-called “root-causes” of illegal migration. While this figure may look impressive on paper, it does not effectively address the Biden Border Crisis that is negatively affecting countries in the region. Officials from this region continue to denounce the Biden administration’s immigration approach, and so it must put a halt to its border crisis before relations become even more fractured.
White House COVID-19 response leader Dr. Anthony Fauci could not answer why the Omicron variant screening process for individuals arriving lawfully to the United States is different than the process for those arriving unlawfully at the southern border. Fauci claimed it was a “different issue.” Why he views these two groups differently is unclear, but what is clear is that COVID remains rampant at the southern border with virtually non-existent mitigation protocols in place.