Surge in Illegal Immigrants Swamping Border Towns at Worrying Levels: Report
Less than a month into his tenure, President Joe Biden has managed to bring one aspect of American life at least back to where it was before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The number of illegal aliens being arrested and then released into swamped border cities has reached a high not seen since December 2019, according to a report Thursday.
And there’s a good reason for it.
“We came now in part because of the law change,” one illegal immigrant arrested in February and released last week told The Wall Street Journal in Del Rio, Texas, one of the towns that have been saddled with an exploding illegal alien population.
“It seemed like there is more tolerance.”
But as The Journal noted, American immigration law hasn’t changed since former President Donald Trump left the White House.
What has changed, however, is the message the United States is telegraphing to countries that are the sources of illegal immigrants — to the men and women who’ve decided that breaking American laws doesn’t carry a consequence worth worrying about much when it’s weighed against the prospect of improving their lives by living in the greatest country on the planet.
And the reason that message is being telegraphed is that the man currently in the White House heads a political party that is already planning to grant amnesty to the estimated 11 million illegal aliens currently in the country and create a path to coveted American citizenship.
Already, Biden has issued an executive order reinstating the “catch and release” policy Trump discontinued, which essentially allows illegal aliens to remain free in the country pending a court date at some point in the future.
The surge in Central American migrants headed north started even before Biden was sworn into office. And even if the then-incoming administration tried to send a message via NBC News that “now is not the time to make the journey,” the numbers reported by The Wall Street Journal show many potential illegal immigrants were already drawing their own conclusions about what the change in administrations might portend.
Border Patrol agents arrested 7,260 illegal immigrants in family groups in January, compared with 4,500 in December, according to The Journal. And that’s only a fraction of the wave:
“In total, more than 75,000 people were arrested crossing the border illegally in January, the most in any January in more than a decade,” the report said. “The majority were single adults, who unlike families and unaccompanied children can be quickly returned to Mexico.”
Mexican law now mandates family groups with children be accepted from the United States only if government shelter is available for them, according to The Journal. With Mexican shelters filled to capacity because of the surge, it is not accepting more, The Journal reported.
So, that leaves U.S. border towns grappling with an influx of impoverished foreigners in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.
Those are the kinds of conditions — minus the pandemic — that led Trump to declare an emergency in February 2019 and direct Defense Department funds toward building a wall to stop illegal immigration.
To the Biden administration, of course, there is no more emergency on the border — the president himself has said so.
The country might still be in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic. The president himself might be constantly photographed wearing a mask (or even two of them) while Democratic governors keep their residents in a state of semi-permanent lockdown.
But one thing about the country appears to be coming back to normal: The illegal immigration crisis that helped propel Trump to the presidency in the first place.
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