Who Will Close the Border?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

More than 1,000 illegal migrants openly walked across the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas Sunday night, capping a record-breaking 3-day weekend in which 2,460 illegal migrants were “processed” there by federal agents. El Paso is just one of nine sectors defined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico.

About 500 miles downriver from El Paso, two large groups totalling 1,000 migrants crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, in the Del Rio Sector, last Friday, after 700 migrants had crossed the day before. On Saturday, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted that “CBP sources tell us more than 4,800 migrants have crossed illegally in just these two sectors in the last 24 hours.”

From his first day in office, Joe Biden has signaled his administration’s policy and promise not to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. The predictable result is that a relentless human tide of uninvited people from around the world have been entering our country from the south, after first passing through the lawless narco-state of Mexico.

The roughly 5,000 people who surrender every day to be “processed” by Border Patrol agents in CBP do not even include the thousands of known “got-aways.” That’s the official term for migrants who evade arrest when they sneak across the border, because they have prior criminal records for drug trafficking or sex crimes.

The number of got-aways has exploded under Biden because no Border Patrol agents are available to stop and arrest them. That’s because Biden’s anti-American DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has reassigned CBP and Border Patrol agents to “processing” the unprecedented hordes of illegal migrants who voluntarily turn themselves in every day.

Nor do the numbers include the thousands of people who enter legally through airports or other ports of entry, but then violate the terms of their admission by staying too long, working illegally, or committing deportable crimes. These people are just as illegal as the migrants who waded across the Rio Grande, but we can’t find them without implementing the entry-exit system that Congress mandated over 20 years ago,

The sheer numbers of these unwanted people are so gargantuan that we struggle for words to express how rapidly our country has changed for the worse since Joe Biden took power 23 months ago. The best estimates are that the number of illegal aliens has increased by at least 5,000,000 since Biden became president less than two years ago.

Five million is greater than the population of half of the 50 states. It’s greater than all but one of our cities and all but two of our counties.

The number of invaders is projected to increase substantially when the Title 42 expulsion policy goes away on December 21 as ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan. That’s the same federal judge who persecuted General Mike Flynn on trumped-up charges, even refusing to recognize the Justice Department’s dismissal of all charges against Flynn.

More than half of the five million new migrants have been wrongly classified as asylum seekers, despite the principle that requires refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they come to. All of the migrants crossing our southern border passed through at least one safe country on their way to the United States, so their bogus asylum claims should have been tossed without further ado.

Even the newly elected Republican majority in the House of Representatives has not shown the appetite or the will to reverse the flow of people across the border. Many Republicans speak only of the crisis “at” the border, as if the problem is just the 5,000 people who crossed yesterday, rather than the 5,000,000 who crossed in the last two years.

“One of the highest priorities, when the Republicans take back Congress,” Donald Trump declared at a rally in Florence, Arizona on January 15, “will be to . . . find and detain and deport every one of the illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country.”

Trump’s commonsense promise was cheered by his thousands of supporters, but it has gained no traction in the halls of Congress, where Democrats and even some Republicans are trotting out discredited ideas to extend amnesty to illegal migrants. A week after the midterm elections, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was bold enough to say the quiet part out loud.

“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to,” Schumer declared. “The only way we’re going to have a great future is if we welcome immigrants.”

Schumer’s avowed goal of replacing the American population with immigrants is an open declaration of war on the family-friendly, hard-working, middle-class Americans who form the base of the Republican party. Will Republican leaders rise to meet the challenge?

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.