(The Daily Signal)—What a difference a new year and a new president makes.
More and more good news from the southern border highlights how the Biden administration intentionally created a catastrophe and how President Donald Trump—through a change in policy and rhetoric—has reversed the system practically overnight.
We didn’t need the phony “border security” bill President Joe Biden championed—which was really more of a handout to Ukraine—to fix the problem. We just needed an executive branch willing to enforce the law.
Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks said in a CBS News interview on Thursday that unlawful crossings at the southern border are down 94% since this time last year.
Over the past week, Border Patrol agents have apprehended an average of 285 border crossers a day along the entire border, Banks told CBS. That compares to about 4,800 a day at the beginning of 2024.
“Banks attributed the dramatic drop in illegal immigration to a slew of executive actions taken by President Trump,” CBS reported. “They include an order that has effectively closed the U.S. asylum system and allowed for summary deportations, as well as the cancellation of Biden administration policies that allowed some migrants to enter the country with the government’s permission.”
The Trump administration now requires aliens applying for asylum to file their cases in the embassies of other countries, rather than after they enter the U.S. This has arguably had one of the largest impacts on the border crossing numbers.
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1892954047080001650
The old Biden policy, allowing aliens to apply for asylum on U.S. soil, explains, in part, why so many people showed up. If they could get their foot in the door of the U.S., there was a good chance they could stay, whether they had a legitimate asylum case or not.
Banks also said Trump’s decision to deploy troops to the border has ensured that things would be all quiet on the southern front.
In an extensive review of the changes on the border, the New York Post reported that there has been a “complete 180 from the border under the Biden administration, when [border] agents were stuck in holding centers processing migrants, some of whom were criminals, gangbangers, and terrorists, whom they were most of the time letting go into the U.S.”
Now, border agents spend their time on active patrols, right on the front lines. Now, agents outnumber the border crossers, another good sign for current and future enforcement. As the old saying goes, the side that’s winning is typically the one with the largest battalions.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, spoke at a press conference on Thursday about the good news, but also said that the illegal immigration issue is still far from solved. The bleeding wound has been wrapped up but not resolved: there is still the issue of dealing with all the illegal aliens the Biden administration released into the country.
“I will promise you that the full might of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and every element and instrument of national power will be used to remove, with speed, all criminal illegals from the soil of the United States of America,” Miller said.
He also noted that the administration will go on offense to break up the drug cartels that facilitated so much of the illegal immigration and trafficking of illicit drugs across the U.S. border with Mexico. The cartels will be designated as terrorist organizations.
“Today, it is officially the law of the land … that six Mexican cartels, and two transnational gangs—Tren de Aragua and MS-13 … are now formally designated as foreign terrorist organizations,” he said. “This is a sea change in U.S. policy.”
https://twitter.com/RapidResponse47/status/1892642258928701443
Getting control of the cartels that have practically taken over Mexico may be the greatest challenge of all. That won’t happen overnight. But the shift of U.S. policy toward protecting and prioritizing our nation’s sovereignty is paying immediate and enormous dividends.
The four-year catastrophe when America was treated more as an open-ended economic zone rather than a country with citizens and duly upheld laws has drawn to a swift close.
Let’s hope that at least some extent of the long-term damage can be undone and that a return to an open borders era won’t happen any time soon … or ever again.
