President Joe Biden became president largely by promising to Make America Normal Again.
The shambolic U.S.-Mexico “border” confirms how Biden shattered that promise. There is nothing normal about the coast-to-coast disaster over which he governs, thanks largely to his deeply abnormal definition of border security.
Under Biden, the southern “border” has become a giant, open-air staging ground from which illegal aliens bludgeon U.S. territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,671,266 illegal aliens during President Donald Trump’s final 27 months in power. In Biden’s first 27 months, they encountered a breathtaking 5,249,144 illegals — up a skin-crawling 314%.
In fiscal year 2020, the last one that Trump fully controlled, 69,000 illegal migrants were detected on the “border” but got away into America’s interior. In fiscal 2022 (entirely on Biden’s watch), got-aways hit 599,000—up a mind-blowing 768% versus FY ’20.
Federal agents busted an Afghan illegal alien on May 10 at Otay Mesa, California, near San Diego. His fingerprints confirmed his spot on the terrorist watch list.
This fanatic is hardly alone. Terrorist-list designees arrested at the “border” have exploded from three in fiscal 2020, with Trump fully in control, to 15 in fiscal 2021, 98 in fiscal 2022, and 85 through April—just halfway through fiscal 2023. And these were those who were intercepted. Aside from the 183 suspected terrorists apprehended on Biden’s watch, how many walk America’s streets today? Who knows?
As though the U.S. needed more homeless people, illegal aliens who get waved into America now clog the sidewalks and alleys of El Paso, Texas, and other cities.
Even more illegals receive court dates for asylum hearings—in 2026, 2027, and beyond. What will they do until then? Who knows?
Free bus rides whisk illegal aliens to Chicago, where some have slept on the floors of local police stations. A plan to house 250 to 500 illegals in the abandoned South Shore High School enraged predominantly black locals.
“Send them back!” some yelled at a community meeting on the matter. One protester’s placard read: “Build the Wall 2024.”
“We have no jobs in our community, and we have been fighting for jobs for decades,” resident Natasha Dunn told the Chicago Sun-Times. “So, please tell me, how is this fair?”
Rather than instruct illegal aliens on incoming buses to return to the southern “border” and swim home, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, tried housing them in government-school gymnasia. Parents erupted, and Adams backed down.
Regardless, he still shoehorns illegals into luxury hotel rooms that cost taxpayers an estimated $8,000 a month each—some $258 per night. Cost to aliens: $0.00. Midtown Manhattan’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel is becoming an illegal-alien shelter.
“Almost 50 percent of those hotel rooms are taken up by migrant asylum seekers that [sic] we are paying for,” Adams said. “So, instead of monies coming from people who are visiting us and spending in our tourism, in our Broadway plays, instead of them using those hotels, we are using those hotels.”
“New York’s combined state and local hotel taxes total 14.75%,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Ira Mehlman observed. “So, not only is the city paying to house the migrants, they are losing substantial revenues on hotel occupancy taxes.”
These are just a few glimpses of the chaos that flows downhill from Biden’s busted “border.” Worst of all, this is neither an accident, nor incompetence. At the current pace, Biden’s deliberate policy will vacuum an estimated 9.3 million illegal aliens into America before his current term ends.
Biden and his comrades are betting that these illegals are Future Democrats of America who will be so grateful for being allowed to invade the USA that they will vote Democratic, flip GOP states Democratic, permanently transform the White House into the private property of the Democrat National Committee, and devolve America into a neo-Marxist, one-party state.
Biden and the Democrats deserve to vanish beneath a cascade of national scorn that is anything but normal.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.