By Ira Mehlman
After three and a half years of contradictory claims that there is no crisis at borders, and that he lacks the authority to halt mass illegal immigration, President Biden issued a “Presidential Proclamation on Securing the Border” on June 3. With great fanfare, the President and White House officials described the executive action as a strong measure that would restore control of our borders and end the wholesale abuse of our asylum policies.
In reality, the presidential proclamation is riddled with loopholes and falls far short of the real policy changes needed to stop the border crisis.
To begin with, Biden’s executive action is modeled after the so-called “bipartisan” Senate bill that twice failed to pass because it, too, was riddled with loopholes. Invoking Sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the executive action “suspends the entry” of aliens under certain conditions. More specifically, aliens will not be permitted to cross the border after 2,500 aliens on average are apprehended between ports of entry over a seven-day period. At a minimum, that means the administration is willing to allow more than 900,000 aliens to cross illegally into the United States, before it takes action.
Second, and equally important, illegal aliens crossing at ports of entry – which now account for 40 percent of illegal crossings – are not counted towards the 2,500 threshold. By exempting crossings at ports of entry, the Biden administration can continue to steer illegal aliens to ports of entry, process them, and release them into the U.S. without being forced to use the expulsion authority. Currently, 1,450 illegal aliens a day (more than 500,000 a year) use Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) One app to schedule an appointment at a legal port of entry and nearly all of them are allowed to cross into the United States.
Finally, the proclamation exempts large populations of illegal aliens from being expelled under the new authority. These groups include:
Unaccompanied alien children (UACs);
Aliens encountered and processed at ports of entry through the CBP One mobile app—which includes asylum seekers and would-be parolees;
Any alien the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decides to let in “based on the totality of the circumstances,” or “urgent humanitarian, and public health interests”; and
Any alien who DHS authorizes to enter “due to operational considerations at the time of the entry or encounter that warranted permitting the noncitizen to enter.”
Despite the “get-tough” appearance of his executive action, President Biden is not reversing any of his policies that triggered the largest and most sustained wave of illegal immigration in our history. It does not roll back any of the at least 146 other measures taken by the administration to undermine our border security and weaken our immigration laws. Those actions include immediately halting construction of the border wall, stopping the Remain in Mexico policy to quickly remove illegal aliens to Mexico while their asylum claims are pending, rescinding asylum cooperative agreements with Central American countries, and gutting interior enforcement in the country for effectively monitoring and removing illegal aliens.
FAIR was able to quickly prepare a detailed analysis to rebut claims that the presidential proclamation was a meaningful effort to secure our borders and end mass illegal immigration. When the final details of the plan were revealed, FAIR provided media outlets and congressional offices with accurate information about what the proclamation does and does not do.
FAIR also refuted the White House’s repeated claim that the defeat of the Senate bill represented a failure by Congress to address the border crisis by reminding the media and the public that an effective border security bill, H.R. 2, was passed by the House of Representatives in May 2023, but has been bottled up in the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has refused to bring it to the floor for a vote.
https://www.fairus.org/fair-exposes-bidens-executive-action-sham