Biden announces border ‘crackdown’ that will still let in at least 1.8 million illegally per year
President Biden announced an executive order Tuesday that officials say will shut down the US-Mexico border if illegal crossings top 2,500 per day for seven consecutive days — a “crackdown” that will still allow at least 1.8 million asylum seekers into America each year even if fully enforced.
The order, due to take effect immediately, will bar additional illegal immigrants from applying for asylum during periods of heavy traffic, but would lift those restrictions two weeks after daily crossings average 1,500 per day for seven days, administration officials said.
Even if migration is limited to 2,500 per day for a full calendar year, the number of crossings would reach 912,500.
Hundreds of thousands more have been allowed into the US using the CBP One app, with 529,250 migrants to gain admission as of the end of this month since appointments increased to 1,450 per day last June. Biden announced the program in January 2023.
Additionally, Biden has ushered roughly 360,000 more migrants per year into the country through a mass parole scheme allowing Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to fly directly to America.
That works out to a yearly total of 1.8 million border crossers — a figure that would represent the fifth-highest number of nationwide encounters on record, only outstripped in all four years of Biden’s administration.
That number also does not include hundreds of thousands of so-called “gotaways” who are believed to have escaped detection by law enforcement and disappeared into the interior to the tune of around 1.7 million since Biden took office.
The all-time record for immigration stops was set in fiscal year 2023, when more than 3.2 million people were stopped. In fiscal year 2022, more than 2.7 million were apprehended. So far this fiscal year, nearly 2 million people have been stopped. In fiscal year 2021, more than 1.9 million were stopped attempting to enter the US.
Border Patrol encounters of illegal migrants were significantly lower under Trump.
The previous peak was in 2019, when Border Patrol encountered more than 1.1 migrants. In 2020, the number went down to 646,822, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden, 81, attempted to blame his border crisis on Republicans and what he called a “worldwide” situation in a brief speech — even adopting pre-election rhetoric commonly used by conservatives.
“Today, I’m moving past Republican obstruction and using executive authorities available as president to do what I can on my own to address the border,” the president said, before warning lax border enforcement could make the crisis even worse — as GOP politicians have long argued.
“There is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there’s no limit to the number of people who may try to come because there’s no better place on the planet than the United States of America,” Biden said.
What to know about the Biden administration's "crackdown" on the border:
- President Biden announced an executive order that would shut down the US-Mexico border if illegal crossings reach over 2,500 for seven consecutive days.
- The order prevents migrants from applying for asylum during the shutdown period, but the restrictions will be lifted once crossings average 1,500 per day for seven straight days.
- Critics have pointed out that the border “crackdown” would still allow 1.8 million asylum seekers into the county if fully enforced.
- Border Patrol agents told The Post that the Biden administration plan is “too little, too late”
The president declined to take any questions on his action, including the clearly audible query, “Why now?” — with critics pointing out that the move comes five months and one day before the Nov. 5 election.
Biden in January claimed “I’ve done all I can do” to address the border meltdown, while Republicans argue he had in fact unleashed the crisis, including by terminating former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that required most asylum seekers to wait court decisions outside of the US.
Under Biden, most illegal border-crossers have been issued a government smartphone and paperwork that entitles them to a work permit after a six-month period — with badly backlogged immigration proceedings meaning dubious claims of persecution may take years to adjudicate.
The new restrictions include several exceptions. They do not extend to those who use CBP One to cross over at a port of entry, nor do they cover “unaccompanied children, victims of a severe form of trafficking, those who face an acute medical emergency or an imminent and extreme threat to life and safety and other non-citizens who have a valid visa or some other lawful permission to enter the United States,” officials said.
“The border will never be ‘shut down’ under this executive action but rather serve to legalize an unjustified level of open borders that will further perpetuate the chaos and lawlessness we’ve experienced during the entirety of the Biden Administration,” former acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan told The Post.
Morgan emphasized that the new order won’t end catch and release of migrants, the use of parole, or enhance enforcement by ICE.
It also won’t enhance the vetting of migrants caught at the border, former Yuma sector Border Patrol chief Chris Clem told The Post.
“Unless those arrested entering illegally are immediately detained and returned, there will be little change. I don’t think anything in the vetting system changes,” Clem said.
Cartels will also utilize major loopholes in the plan to continue to smuggle migrants across the border by instructing their customers to make claims that they have a fear of returning home to get released into the country, retired Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge of the El Paso Station Clay Thomas told The Post.
“You just gave them the answer,” Thomas said of the cartels’ operations.
“They already know how to do this and they basically are rewriting their business plan based on what the Biden administration outlined.”
Additionally, unaccompanied minors will be exempt from the rules, with Thomas predicting “an influx of those guys” as a result.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) dismissed the executive order as “window dressing” after the Biden administration “engineered the open border.”
“It was 126 days ago today that Joe Biden said, ‘I’ve done all I can do,’” Johnson said in a Tuesday press conference, mentioning the president’s January deflection of his executive power.
“We counted 64 specific executive actions that President Biden and [Homeland Security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas took to open that border wide. They did it intentionally,” he added. “If he was concerned about the border, he would have done this a long time ago.”
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) claimed to The Post that Biden had to take the action because Congress failed to pass bipartisan legislation to secure the border earlier this year.
“The reality is that under that bill, cases would have been adjudicated in 90 days, and in that 90 days, consistent with the past several decades, 80% of the people at a minimum would be denied and would be immediately deported,” Suozzi said
“It gets me a little riled up,” he went on. “Mike Johnson and others have said ‘too little, too late.’ And my response is, you know, ‘How about too nothing, too never?’”
“I’m glad that the president is taking this action, but there’s got to be a lot more done by the United States Congress,” he added, noting how easily Mexican cartels have exploited loopholes in immigration law.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who led the impeachment push against Mayorkas earlier this year, said the order “maintains incentives to cross illegally, because mass catch-and-release remains solidly in place.”
“Even if the asylum process is temporarily halted, what will Border Patrol agents do with all those who continue arriving and don’t claim asylum? They will either have to release them, or detain and remove them — and we know Biden and Mayorkas will not allow the latter,” Green said. “They aren’t even currently using all the beds Congress authorized in the latest appropriations bill.”
Another senior House Republican aide told The Post that the order was a matter of “shifting the numbers around” and moving the burden off of Border Patrol agents between ports of entry.
An earlier version of the order, sources told The Post last month, was set to cap migrant entries at ports of entry and between ports of entry at 4,000 per day on average — a total of 1.46 million over a full year.
Other congressional Republicans dismissed Biden’s move as an election-year stunt, since he already rolled back Trump administration immigration policies via executive orders, including halting construction of a border wall as well as ending the Title 42 and “Remain in Mexico” policies.
Those latter policies stemmed the flow of migrants on the southern border in particular by more than 70%, Johnson said in February.
Since Biden entered office in January 2021, more than 9 million migrants have been recorded entering illegally nationwide and roughly 1.7 million are known to have sneaked in without arrest.
In January, Biden, 81, said he had “asked” for the power to control the border “from the very day I got into office” and told reporters at this point he had “done all I can do.”
“Just give me the power,” he said at the time. “Give me the Border Patrol, give me the people, the judges — give me the people who can stop this and make it work right.”
Federal authorities apprehended an average of 5,990 migrants per day on the southern border in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a number which does not include the known “gotaways” who aren’t captured.
Most of those arrested are then given court orders and released into the US to seek asylum.
Former President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in 2019 that 1,000 illegal crossings per day would constitute an overwhelming crisis at the southern border.
According to internal CBP data exclusively obtained by The Post, US Border Patrol recorded more than 10,000 migrants in custody nationwide on Wednesday.
The Biden administration also recently announced an order to process some migrants’ asylum cases if they claim to be heading to big cities such as Atlanta, New York or Los Angeles when they arrive at the border.
In February, the president had considered other executive actions to expel migrants if they cross the border illegally between ports of entry, according to Politico, and to swiftly deport those who do not have a “credible fear” of returning to their home country from the US.
Polls so far in 2024 show the president is behind Trump in a general election matchup, with voters listing illegal immigration and border security as the most critical issues.
