Trump's border ground game is off to a fast start. To guarantee change Congress must do 3 things
We’re only a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, and the executive orders have been flying out of the White House like unidentified drones from a New Jersey hanger—particularly on border matters. Let’s take stock.
The trees felled for Trump’s blitz of directives shouldn’t obscure the forest, which is a clash of two ideologies.
On the left is President Joe Biden’s globalist acceptance of mass migration, coordinated by the UN and paid for by rich nations.
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On the right is the perspective championed by Trump, which holds that sovereign nations with secure borders decide who enters their countries, and on what terms.
Trump’s ground game makes sense with that big picture in mind. It’s two-fold: undo the policies that drew illegal migrants in, and ramp up the moribund process of removing those already here.
The Biden administration accepted that mass migration from the Third World to the First was unavoidable—even desirable. Their strategy was to create what they called "safe, orderly, lawful pathways," euphemisms which disguised allowing mass illegal entry via unauthorized parole programs. They combined this with releasing aliens caught entering illegally at the border into an endless, desultory asylum process.
They flew these aliens all over the country and diverted federal funds to support them. To make certain few would ever be removed, they crippled interior enforcement through procedural limitations and red tape. The final stage would surely have been to extort a mass amnesty from Congress.
The toll from the last four years is breathtaking. Over 11 million people were encountered trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas once admitted that DHS was releasing more than 85% of them. I saw it for myself in Arizona, California, and Texas.
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Inadmissible aliens were let in from 180 countries, with 1,000% increases from Afghanistan, China, and even less friendly places. Over 542,945 unaccompanied alien children were let in, and unprecedented numbers of Special Interest Aliens and people on the terrorism watch list. For most of these people, the U.S. had no verifiable identification, let alone criminal history back home. This resulted in preventable crimes that we will continue to see for years.
Americans saw the results, and a majority voted for Trump to secure the border and enforce immigration laws. What he’s implementing now is a strategy along multiple lines of effort to turn off the magnet attracting illegal migrants, stop funding the influx, and ramp up enforcement.
In a nutshell, the aim is to deter, detain, and (if so ordered) deport illegal migrants, rather than process them in and punt them into an endless legal process quagmire.
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In his Monday executive actions, Trump declared an invasion at the southern border—and an emergency, for good measure. He called Mexican cartels terrorists and called for "maximum" vetting for visa applicants. He ordered wall-building restarted. He ended the parole programs Biden used to bring in 75,000 off-the-books inadmissible aliens every month.
Trump has ended catch-and-release at the border and unchained ICE from onerous process rules. He instructed agencies to deprive uncooperative "sanctuary" jurisdictions of federal funds.
Though this has been an incredible week of action, much more needs to be done. The government will be fighting scores of lawsuits from activists, naturally. But to make Trump’s achievements lasting, Congress will need to change some laws.
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1. At the very least, they should aim to cap immigration parole so it can never again be perverted to bypass our refugee process. To meet the detention requirement of existing law, plus the new Laken Riley Act, they should fund more beds for illegal aliens during their court process.
2. Congress should also end government funding of the U.N. entities and "non-profit" NGOs who’ve been fed billions to facilitate illegal mass migration.
3. Congress could amend the laws that incentivize smuggling children into the U.S. and then require states to educate them. They could also cut illegal aliens off from federal welfare.
Some of that is too much to hope for. Congress has other big fish to fry. But this week, it’s hard to imagine that more progress could have been made on border security in so little time. And only once the border is secure will discussion of legal immigration reform be palatable to the public.