In the end, the only thing that will end the ongoing border crisis is to fix our asylum and immigration laws.
Whatever your view of immigration, there can be no doubt that the Biden administration’s border policies have been an abject failure. This is especially true of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health order that for the last three years, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, allowed border officials to expel illegal immigrants quickly back to Mexico.
Title 42 came to an end on Thursday when the Covid public health emergency officially ended, and its ending has coincided with what can only be described as absolute chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border this past week.
Border Patrol agents are now arresting more than 10,000 illegal immigrants every day. If you have no context for that figure, consider that in March 2019, at the onset of the last border crisis, Border Patrol was arresting 4,000 illegal immigrants a day. At the time, President Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said, “I know that 1,000 [apprehensions] overwhelms the system and I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like.”
What 10,000 a day looks like is a humanitarian catastrophe. Put bluntly, Border Patrol has nowhere to put these people. If it keeps up for much longer, we’ll see a string of what amount to massive migrant camps appear across south Texas — think of the encampment of 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, multiplied many times over all up and down the border.
What 10,000 a day means is that our southwest border is collapsing. The Texas cities of Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville have issued emergency declarations, as has New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who still refuses to order state law enforcement and military units to arrest and deport illegal immigrants caught crossing the Rio Grande, has deployed a new National Guard unit, the Texas Tactical Border Force, to try to “deter” illegal crossings.
