In his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, President Trump said something about illegal immigration that has become obvious since he took office in January: The border crisis under President Biden was a policy the Democrats chose on purpose, and they could have ended it at any time. The argument that Congress needed to pass new legislation to secure the border was always a canard, an excuse to do nothing and let the border crisis fester.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border,” said Trump. “But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
Trump is right of course, as events over the past six weeks have demonstrated. But it wasn’t just Democrats who pushed this line during the Biden administration. Last year, Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma introduced a $118-billion “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill that was touted by the corporate press, Democrats, and the GOP establishment as the only solution to the illegal immigration crisis on the southern border.
We were told by then-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer that this bill was the only thing that could stem the tide of illegal immigration, which by February 2024 had reached record levels. In December 2023, a jaw-dropping 300,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in a single month, a new record. By this point in Biden’s tenure, millions of illegal aliens had snuck into the country, most of them released into the interior on their own recognizance. It was a crisis that began the day Biden took office and rescinded nearly every border measure Trump had put into place during his first term.
The Lankford bill, which was really a McConnell bill, was touted as a great deal for Republican border hawks that would put an end to mass illegal immigration and solve the Biden border crisis. It would have provided significant new funding for more Border Patrol agents, completion of certain sections of the border wall, and overhauled our outdated asylum system.
But the devil was in the details. While purporting to secure the border, the bill would have allowed about 2 million illegal immigrants into the country annually, so long as the apprehension numbers stayed below 5,000 per day for seven consecutive days or below 8,500 apprehensions in a single day — a ridiculous and arbitrary scheme for instantiating in federal law what would have amounted to an open border regime that allowed thousands of illegals to enter the country daily.
And yet the bill was championed by Lankford and McConnell as the only way to “fix” the border and end the crisis. It was, Lankford claimed, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to close our open border and give future administrations the effective tools they need to stop the border chaos and protect our nation.”
As details of the bill’s de facto amnesty provisions came out, however, GOP senators and Republican lawmakers in the House came out against it, and eventually Trump came out against it as well. They rightly argued that any major reform of our immigration system that allowed 8,500 illegal border-crossers into the country before triggering a border shut-down was tantamount to an open borders policy.
It soon became clear that the bill was nothing more than a thinly-veiled scheme orchestrated by McConnell and Senate Democrats to mollify Republicans with fake border security provisions in exchange for more Ukraine funding (the bill would have funded both). When GOP leaders in the House balked at the Lankford bill, Biden and the Democrats immediately blamed them for being unwilling to do anything to solve the border crisis for fear of giving Biden a political win. That talking point was then repeated on a loop by the corporate press, and the narrative was set that Trump and the Republicans were cynically killing the Lankford bill for political reasons, and didn’t really care about securing the border.
But as my colleague Kylee Zempel noted at the time, it was a totally disingenuous argument: “We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque ‘expulsion authority’ in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.”
Today, some six weeks into Trump’s second term, we know that the Lankford bill was never necessary to secure the border. Trump has already brought illegal immigration levels down to historic lows — and he didn’t need Congress to pass a new law to do it.
The number of illegal immigrants apprehended by U.S. authorities at the southern border has plummeted to the lowest monthly level this century, with just under 8,500 apprehensions recorded in February, according to preliminary government data obtained this week by CBS News. The February numbers follow a dramatic drop that began immediately after Trump won the election, with illegal crossings dipping from 106,000 in October to just 61,000 in January.
What a contrast this is to monthly illegal crossings under the Biden administration, which often exceeded 200,000, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of “got-aways” who crossed every month and escaped apprehension by U.S. Border Patrol.
What accounts for the sudden change is, of course, Trump’s policies and his willingness to enforce immigration laws already on the books. Upon taking office in January, the president reinstated many of the policies and programs from his first term that Biden had scrapped, like “Remain in Mexico,” and ended Biden’s open borders programs like the CBP One app. And Trump did this while consistently conveying a clear message to would-be migrants: If you cross the Rio Grande illegally, you will not be allowed to stay in the United States.
The results speak for themselves — and they expose the lie that Lankford, McConnell, and the GOP establishment tried to peddle, along with Biden and the Democrats, that nothing could be done to secure the border unless Congress passed a new law. That argument was never anything but a lazy attempt to trick Republican lawmakers into approving more Ukraine funding, which is why Lankford’s bill tied the two unrelated things together.
Remember that the next time institutional Washington rises up with one voice and insists that some “bipartisan” law must be passed in order to achieve a policy outcome that Trump supporters want but the GOP establishment doesn’t really care about, like ending illegal immigration and securing the border.
Jesus Christ is King
