Fact Check: Joe Biden Claims Border Security Bill Was ‘Toughest… Ever’

Claim: President Joe Biden claimed that the Senate leaders’ February border bill was “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” during his State of the Union speech.

Verdict: False.

Biden claimed: “In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country.”

But the complex, legal jargon in the bill invited more wage-cutting migration by minimizing border barriers, mandating catch-and-release for economic migrants, protecting Biden’s parole backdoor for wage-cutting employers, funding more aid for migrants, and even creating an asylum highway overseen by a pro-migration corps of “Asylum Officers working outside the U.S. courts. 

On March 6, Breitbart News posted a detailed rebuttal of Biden’s much-repeated boast of the “toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country”:

A primary enabler of the mass illegal migration is that migrants are confident they can repay their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels by getting jobs in the United States.

In his February 29 visit to the border, Biden described the migrants’ rational calculations: “When the criminal gangs said, ‘We’ll get you to the north for $8,000 bucks’ … they’re not going to pay the cartels thousands of dollars to make that journey knowing that they’ll be turned around quickly.”

But Biden is not turning the migrants back. So far, he has allowed at least 6.2 million migrants to walk through the border and into the U.S. jobs that pay the smuggling debts to the cartels.

Many of the migrants who are rejected at the border quickly sneak back in as “got-aways” because they know that Biden’s border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — has instructed immigration officers to not deport the migrants who reach jobs if they do not commit major crimes.

This federal “catch and release” policy enables the cartels’ labor-trafficking business of migrants north, cash south.

But the Senators’ border bill strengthened this conveyor belt of migrant labor and cartel cash by requiring border officers to release migrants who merely say they will apply for asylum.

The law creates a “new section 235B to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and create[s] something called “Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings” (PNRP),” former immigration judge Andrew Arthur wrote in Center for Immigration Studies report:

“That section would allow the DHS secretary — based only on undefined “operational circumstances” — to send migrants to PNRP if they express a fear of persecution or request asylum …

Unlike section 235(b)(1) of the INA — which [now] mandates detention for illegal migrants who are subject to expedited removal, including those found to have valid credible fear claims — that PNRP process under proposed section 235B of the INA mandates release. Not “authorizes” release — mandates it.

Release for the adults in PNRPs would be premised on those aliens being placed on “alternatives to detention” (ATD), but even that rule is not absolute. Only the adult head of a household released under PNRP is subject to ATD, not other adults and not the children … ATD is a costly failure that does nothing to ensure that aliens appear for removal [deportation].”

ATD is Biden’s alternative to the existing legal requirement that migrants be detained until their asylum cases are concluded. But ATD invites migrants because it allows them to get U.S. jobs and pay off their smuggling debts even when their asylum cases are entirely bogus.

The bill also allowed migrants to quickly get work permits — and thus better-paying jobs — instead of waiting roughly 120 days under current law.

In summary, Biden’s “toughest … border security reform” claim is false.