Opinion: Trump was right to kill the border bill, and Biden just proved it

Phil Boas, Arizona Republic

So, it turns out Donald Trump was right about the bipartisan immigration bill.

We didn’t need it to stop historic levels of illegal immigration.

Proof of that is Joe Biden.

That’s right, the Democratic president is proving the Republican former president and candidate for his job was on the mark.

This week, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security produced the data that settle the matter, as CBS News reported that “Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020.”

Problem solved.

At least from where we were.

DHS argued this was Congress’ problem to fix

Earlier this year when a bipartisan deal was forming, Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas argued that the White House wasn’t responsible for successive years of record-smashing border apprehensions under Biden’s watch.

“We don’t bear responsibility for a broken system,” Mayorkas said. “Fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”

In that spirit, congressional Republicans and Democrats came together to fashion a bill that would have reformed immigration law and made it easier to turn back border crossers.

Bad news for Trump: Border apprehensions are down

Then in February, Donald Trump arrived on the scene and blew it up.

Trump didn’t say it, but he wasn’t going to let Congress save Joe Biden’s bacon in the coming election.

Trump’s fellow Republican, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, did say it. “Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”

Biden undid Trump’s actions, opening the gate

The point was that Donald Trump had taken executive actions when he was president to get control of the U.S.-Mexico border, and one of the first things Joe Biden did when he got in office was to rescind them.

That was a green light to all of Latin America to come to America. The gate was wide open. After two years of record-smashing inflows, illegal border crossings reached 250,000 just in the month of December.

“Illegal border crossings have always happened,” said Manuel Mello, fire chief of the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, to CBS News at the time. “Groups of 10, 12 — that was a large group. But now you see 3,000 and 4,000 in one day. I never thought something like this could happen.”

Americans were making immigration the key issue in the presidential election, and not just European Americans.

Seventy-five percent of U.S. Latinos were telling Pew Research that the border had become “a major problem or a crisis.” Seventy-four percent said the government is not doing a good job.

Biden was hemorrhaging votes on the issue and was pressing Congress to deliver a solution.

Trump tanked a bill, then Biden acted

In what CNN called a “stunning political shift,” Biden promised to “shut down the border right now” if Congress provided him the tools.

“The Trump-like rhetoric from the Democratic president — and the fact that Democrats are not even talking about a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently in the country — is also an important political admission as immigration-focused Donald Trump zeroes in on the Republican presidential nomination and the border crisis reverberates through the country and into Washington, D.C.,” CNN reported.

When Trump left the border bill in ashes, Biden was left to drag his appalling record on illegal immigration into the 2024 presidential election.

In June, he decided to do something about that.

He took executive action to allow immigration officials to deport large numbers of migrants without processing their asylum claims, or what CBS News described as “arguably the most restrictive border policy by a Democratic president in recent history.”

Do you really believe Harris is a border hawk?

Joe Biden had found Jesus in an election year.

A month later, as fate would have it, he would drop out of the race and turn the top of the ticket over to his vice president, Kamala Harris, long an enthusiast of lax border polices and sanctuary city laws.

Harris has enjoyed her own conversion on immigration.

She vows to be even tougher than Biden.

The question for voters is do you believe it?

https://news.yahoo.com/news/illegal-crossings-u-southern-border-100013670.html