Will We Get a Bad Border Deal for Christmas?

(Daily Signal)—Don’t hold your breath that some senators will be able to squeeze border sanity out of the White House in exchange for billions more in aid to Ukraine, all before they go home for Christmas.

Before discussing the latest effort, it’s worth noting new laws aren’t even needed to fix about 80% of the border crisis. President Joe Biden could with a phone call restore policies that kept the border controlled under previous presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

But unlike them, he has allowed his administration’s policy to be dictated by a leftist hard core that rejects borders and law enforcement. He has also diverted billions of tax dollars to the non-governmental organization mass immigration support industry. After nearly three years, we know that the Biden administration officials will not only fail to enforce immigration law, but that they also will continue to subvert and defy it.

So, where are we on border security deal negotiations?

It looks like senators won’t reach agreement before leaving Washington this Friday until the New Year. Even if they did, the deal would need to pass the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has shown a spine when it comes to fighting for real border security.

In backroom negotiations, the Washington Post reports Senate “Democrats have made major concessions … and advocacy groups on the left are furious.” Nonsense.

The embryonic Senate deal would reportedly make it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to deport illegal aliens whose asylum claims fail in court. But with the current backlogs, it takes five or more years for even a patently bogus case to conclude. DHS already has all the authority to deport it needs, yet their annual targets are to remove fewer than 30,000 criminal convict illegal aliens a year, never mind the millions of illegal aliens without such convictions who the administration has released into the country. They have no intention of deporting anyone else here illegally, including failed asylum seekers. The expensive and lengthy asylum process is just Kabuki theater for this administration.

The Senate proposal would also give Biden a new legal authority to expel illegal migrants before they can enter and claim asylum. This power would be simlar to Title 42, which allowed summary expulsions because of COVID-19 until May of this year. Pro-illegal immigration activists describe this as a massive concession, but it isn’t. The president already has the authority—and duty—to deter or detain illegal aliens instead of processing and releasing them as he does. If the cap to trigger the new expulsion authority is at the discretion of Biden’s DHS secretary, then it would never be reached.

Hence, the new, improved Title 42 would be triggered by some acceptable number of illegal border crossers. Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson once said that 1,000 of these a day was a “bad day.” We’re now experiencing over 10,000 a day. If the cap is, say 3,000 a day, then you can expect Biden’s DHS to divert all their energies into expanding their bogus and illegal immigration parole programs. These  bypass the required visa process to fly illegal aliens directly to U.S. ports, thus  avoiding high numbers between ports of entry. The open borders activists in charge of the nation’s immigration policy have done everything in their power to subvert Congress and the law, and they won’t stop now.

Most importantly, “the White House has not expressed any willingness to limit Biden’s power to parole certain categories of immigrants,” a demand that “could throw the negotiations into a tailspin,” according to the Post.

Immigration parole is the administration’s favorite open border tool. Disregarding the clear language of the law and the expressed congressional intent behind it, Biden uses parole as an infinite method to bring in illegal aliens. If parole is untouched, the Biden administration can ramp it up  exponentially, moving the traffic from the border to  interior U.S. airports, and allowing in unlimited illegal migrants under the guise that they will claim asylum. This has not solved the problem; it has just hidden it better in Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ shell game. Using parole, DHS will continue to pour in hundreds of thousands of aliens for whom they have no proven identification, let alone criminal records or background checks.

Senators have to resist a “border security” trap and not sign on to a fig-leaf deal that hands the Biden administration more tools and money to bring in more illegal aliens.

Only serious reforms, like those the House passed in May, will restore the rule of law to our borders. What’s needed includes a substantial change to the current asylum process to weed out the bulk of fraudulent or spurious claims before they clog the pipeline, and a hard numerical cap on the use of true “humanitarian” parole —say 1,000 a year, among other policy and defunding changes. The Senate should not agree to a bad deal that would further harm America.