Today's edition of "if you thought X was bad, just wait until President Biden makes it worse" will feature America's southern border -- again. As soon as today, the Biden administration is expected to nix a policy responsible for turning away more than a million illegal migrants since Biden took office. Invoked in March 2020, Title 42 is an emergency pandemic measure, "not really an immigration policy," explained Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.). Under Title 42, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have turned away more than 1.7 million migrants since the pandemic began.
The Biden administration, upon taking over, "surprisingly enough, kept half of" Title 42 in place for single adults, although waiving it for family units, Lankford explained on "Washington Watch." So, in 2021, while 900,000 people were released into the country, 1.1 million people were turned away. The problem is, many individuals are still waiting to cross our southern border, and more join them every day. Lankford estimates that "at least 2 million illegal immigrants" would enter the country if Title 42 were repealed.
To "turn Title 42 off," the Biden administration will have to "say the pandemic is over," said Lankford. Most Americans of common intelligence would agree -- but not the Biden administration. They have extended the national emergency allowing them to maintain their unscientific mask mandates for airlines and their punitive vaccine mandates for servicemembers. "As of April first," warned Lankford, "if you haven't gotten a vaccination, and you're in the military... they're going to fire you because the pandemic is so important." They will "declare the pandemic over at the border, but at full, raging force if you're in the military. It's completely nonsensical."
Of course, President Biden's management of the southern border is a disaster by any measure, but ending Title 42 will only make a bad situation worse. "We've seen more people illegally cross the border in the 14 months of the Biden administration than we saw all four years under the Trump administration." On his first day in office, President Biden halted construction of the border wall, abandoning materials where they lay. He cancelled the highly successful "Remain in Mexico" policy, which kept asylum-seekers in Mexico while their claims were processed. And he assigned the crisis to Vice President Kamala Harris, who avoided the border for as long as possible.
Now, when border patrol agents apprehend persons illegally crossing the border, "they release them into the country, even though they're crossing illegally," said Lankford. They "give them a piece of paper [which] says, show up in a court six years from now... I wish I was making that date up."
"Border patrol will tell you the border is secure," said Lankford. "It's just secure on the south side." He described the way the cartels toy with Border Patrol, "sending family units across the border in one area" as bait and tracking Border Patrol with a drone. Then, when Border Patrol responds, "the cartels will then run... criminal aliens... or individuals carrying drugs... a couple of miles down the desert to run through another area."
Cartels use family units to shuffle Border Patrol agents around like pawns, trafficking humans, drugs, and other illegal commodities across the border at will. That's the real story of what's happening at the southern border, but the Biden administration seems to treat it merely as a public relations problem, or, at most, a humanitarian one. "I don't find Americans that dislike legal immigration," said Lankford. "They just don't like illegal immigration, and they want to have their border secured and drug [imports] to end."
