While the mainstream media focuses 24/7 on the war over the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, the territorial sovereignty of the United States may get even worse. The open-borders Left has been putting intense pressure on the Biden Administration to end the use of “Title 42” removals at the border—a policy that Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is about to review in April.
Title 42 removals are based on the provision of federal law found at 42 U.S.C. § 265 that empowers the president “to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property” into the United States in order to stop a contagious disease from spreading. President Trump’s CDC issued an order announcing the use of this provision on March 20, 2020, to stop the spread of COVID-19; and the Biden Administration has kept it in place. It allows the Border Patrol to immediately remove aliens encountered at the border.
Since March 2020, the federal government has executed 1.72 million expulsions of illegal aliens under Title 42. The pace of Title 42 removals increased during the Biden Administration. In its first full 13 months in office, the Biden Administration expelled 1,256,748 illegal aliens—or about 97,000 per month. It’s the only effective immigration enforcement tool that the Biden Administration has left in place since taking office.
It has allowed the Border Patrol to at least do something meaningful to respond to the invasion at our southern border.
But that’s only half of the immigration enforcement equation. The other half is interior enforcement to remove illegal aliens who are already in the country, which the Biden Administration has all but destroyed. In January, February, and September of 2021, the Biden Administration issued three policy memoranda that effectively prevent ICE officers from detaining or removing illegal aliens—even though federal law mandates that those aliens must be detained and removed. The consequences of the new Biden non-enforcement policy were devastating.
At the beginning of 2022, many people were wondering why the Biden Administration had not yet issued its FY 2021 ICE Annual Report, which provides total deportation numbers for the fiscal year. We knew that the lax interior enforcement had encouraged a surge of illegal immigration at the border with over 200,000 apprehensions per month at the border during the Summer of 2021. The calendar year 2021 saw approximately 1.9 million apprehensions, more than triple the previous year. But just how bad were the interior enforcement numbers?
Finally, three months late, ICE issued the report on March 11, 2022. And it became clear why the Biden Administration was so reluctant to release it. The numbers were embarrassingly low. In FY 2021, ICE removed only 59,011 noncitizens. That number was down from 185,884 in FY 2020. In other words, in FY 2021 ICE removed only 32% of the number of aliens it removed in FY 2020.
Biden’s immigration policy is like playing defense in a football game without a defensive backfield—no safeties, no defensive backs, and no linebackers either. In such a game, all the offense has to do is get past the defensive line (the Border Patrol); and they score a touchdown every play. Once illegal aliens get a few miles into the United States and past the outmanned Border Patrol, their probability of ever being deported is nearly zero.
And now the Biden Administration is considering removing half of the defensive line too. If Title 42 expulsions are ended, the Border Patrol will become little more than a processing agency for incoming illegal aliens. The losers in this game will be the American people and American sovereignty.
Kris W. Kobach served as the elected Secretary of State of Kansas during 2011-19. He currently serves as general counsel for the Alliance for Free Citizens and is lead counsel for Texas sheriffs and Federal Police Foundation ICE officers who are suing to stop the illegal Biden policies in federal court. His website is www.kriskobach.com.
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