RUTHFULLY YOURS

Record numbers of illegal aliens continue to pour into the United States at the invitation of President Biden’s no-enforcement border policies. The administration is thus feeling the heat from blue-state and big-city Democrats on whom it had never dawned that preening as a “sanctuary” would require, you know, actually providing sanctuary. Their education, health-care, social-welfare, and law-enforcement resources are grossly inadequate to deal with the resulting crisis. It is that political reality, and nothing else, that has forced Biden’s grudging concession to the need for border-wall construction.

Naturally, reality is not welcomed by the Democrats’ transnational-progressive base, which does not believe the United States should have borders or be a nation, and which is used to having its way with our senescent chief executive. (See, e.g., Biden’s joining hard leftists Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Justin Trudeau, respectively the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada, in the “Declaration of North America,” which, among other post-sovereign tripe, celebrates how “North America” has now “welcomed record numbers of migrants and refugees from the Western Hemisphere under new and expanded labor and humanitarian programs.”)

The Left is in revolt over Biden’s sudden conversion to border-wall construction. So, as is wont to happen on those rare occasions when reality intrudes on utopia, Biden is lying. While seeking credit from the country at large for building some (but not nearly enough) border barrier, Biden is telling his base that he had no choice.

“The money was appropriated for the border wall,” he mewled at the White House on Thursday. He really, really tried to get Congress to redirect it, but those bad Republicans wouldn’t hear of it. This from the same man who continues to try to cancel student loans that Congress has not authorized him to cancel, even after the Supreme Court (in June’s Biden v. Nebraska decision) ruled that doing so violates the Constitution he is sworn to uphold.

So now, pouts the president, “there’s nothing under the law other than [for my administration] to use that money for what it was appropriated for.” But the wall-construction funding was appropriated four years ago. Why hasn’t he “had to” build any border wall until now? And if he “had to” do it, then why immediately upon taking office did he order a cessation of border-wall construction? Why did he proclaim during the 2020 campaign, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”?

No one is fooled by this. He’s trying to maintain progressive cred, even as wall construction ramps up, by emphatically answering “No” when asked if he thought the construction he has ordered — because, you know, his hands are tied — would be effective. And even as he carries out Biden’s policy, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas insists, “From Day One, this administration has made clear that a border wall is not the answer. That remains our position and our position has never wavered.”

The livid left is not having it. Fearless House “squad” leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) blasted the administration’s “cruel” policy shift. “The Biden administration was not required to expand construction of the border wall,” she said, “and they certainly were not required to waive several environmental laws to expedite the building.”

Never before have I uttered this, but, yes, AOC is right.

In the notice of determination Mayorkas posted in the Federal Register, he announced that he was directing the construction of border barriers in response to record numbers of illegal-alien crossings, including what he admitted were “over 245,000” illegal “entrants” between ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley Sector alone during the fiscal year just ended — a staggering total that does not factor in the “got-aways” not “encountered” by Border Patrol agents. Mayorkas was clear that, in issuing this directive, he was relying on “my authority” under §102 of the Clinton-era Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. (Section 102 is codified in a note appended to §1103 of the federal immigration laws.)

The IIRIRA, which has been amended a few times since its 1996 enactment, elucidates that the secretary’s authority is discretionary. For instance, in a provision of §102 dealing directly with “Construction of Fencing and Road Improvements Along the [Southwest] Border,” the IIRIRA states:

Nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.

Translation: If Mayorkas really thinks there’s a better border-security strategy than building a wall, he’s not required to build a wall.

As for the waiving of a plethora of laws beloved of progressives — the Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the National Fish and Wildlife Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and so on — the IIRIRA plainly states that the president, through the DHS secretary, has complete authority over whether to suspend enforcement in order to secure the border:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section [amending this section]. Any such decision by the Secretary shall be effective upon being published in the Federal Register. [Emphasis added.]

Obviously, this is why Mayorkas asserted that he is waiving statutes on his own authority, not because Congress had forced the administration’s hand.

Let’s be real: The Biden administration, perhaps even more than its pen-and-phone progenitor, the Obama–Biden administration, subscribes to the counter-constitutional view that the executive need not faithfully execute congressional statutes with which it disagrees on policy or convenience grounds.

Section 235(b) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (codified in §1225(b)(1)(B)(iii)(IV) of the immigration laws) unambiguously states that all illegal aliens seeking admission to the United States “shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution, and if found not to have such a fear, until removed” (emphasis added). In case a president might fail to get the hint, this provision is entitled “Mandatory Detention.” Under its clear-as-a-bell directive, even the tiny minority of aliens who may have a colorable basis for asylum must be held in custody — not released into the United States — until that claim is sorted out.

Unlike the border-wall-construction statutes, which vest the executive with copious discretion, the detention provision actually does tie Biden’s hands. So he ignores it.

Because of his nonenforcement policies, more than 7 million illegal aliens have rushed our borders and ports of entry since Biden took office in January 2021. Indeed, under a new practice in the president’s lawless pseudo-visa program, many of them don’t need to rush the border; he just flies them in. Many of the more than 7 million were turned away because they so obviously qualified for expedited removal, or as a result of the Covid-driven Title 42 ban. Biden erased Title 42, however, because his base decried it as “racist, unjust, and cruel.” As we’ve come to expect of this reckless man, he had no plan to address the ensuing tidal wave of illegal entry.

Biden’s nonenforcement policies encourage so many attempted entries, and so many succeed in sneaking in, that it is impossible to know the exact number of illegal aliens who have made it into the country in the past 33 months. The Border Patrol estimates that more than 1.5 million “got-aways” have entered without being “encountered” by law enforcement, but no one really knows — this could be, and probably is, a lowball estimate. It is safe to say, though, that more than 4 million people have illegally entered the country on Biden’s watch. After all, even before the end-of-summer bedlam we’re still experiencing, Biden had lawlessly admitted more than 2.3 million with nothing more than a request that they show up someday for immigration-court proceedings — which the majority of them will never do, and which proceedings take years to process.

Meantime, in just the past two months, almost half a million illegal immigrants have arrived in the country, with September’s 260,000 setting a new monthly record (i.e., exceeding last December’s 252,000). It’s often 10,000 or more per day. Remember, Obama’s DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, has acknowledged that 1,000 illegal entries in a day is a crisis that “overwhelms the system.” Biden has blown that up by a factor of ten or eleven.

The number of illegal aliens who have entered the United States since Biden took office roughly equals the population of Panama. The Biden illegal population exceeds that of roughly half the states (Louisiana, ranked 25th, has 4.5 million residents). It exceeds the population of Los Angeles (3.8 million). In fact, it exceeds the population of every major American city except New York — a formerly proud “sanctuary” whose own population of more than 8 million has been swelled by the influx of about 120,000 illegal immigrants during the Biden era (only a small percentage of which has been bused up from overrun Texas, notwithstanding Mayor Eric Adams’s bogus attempt to blame Republicans for a catastrophe willfully wrought by Democrats).

If Republicans really want to talk about impeachment, this is the impeachable offense they ought to be talking about all day, every day. It is among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.

Joe Biden has been cornered into half-hearted border-wall construction not by the Congress whose laws he habitually flouts but by his 55 percent disapproval rating heading into the 2024 election campaign. So he poses toward the right as a born-again border cop and toward the left as a victim whose heart is still in the right place. And Biden being Biden, no one believes a word he says.