Title 42 couldn’t solve illegal immigration.

Why Biden’s Border Policies are Failing

The End of Title 42 and the Chaos at the Border

Regardless of your stance on immigration, it’s clear that the Biden administration’s border policies have been a complete failure. This is especially true of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health order that allowed border officials to quickly expel illegal immigrants back to Mexico. However, Title 42 came to an end on Thursday when the Covid public health emergency officially ended, and its ending has coincided with what can only be described as absolute chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border this past week.

The Humanitarian Catastrophe of 10,000 Arrests a Day

Border Patrol agents are now arresting more than 10,000 illegal immigrants every day. This is a staggering number, especially when compared to the 4,000 arrests a day during the onset of the last border crisis in March 2019. The situation is dire, and Border Patrol has nowhere to put these people. If it continues, we’ll see massive migrant camps appear across south Texas, similar to the encampment of 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, multiplied many times over all up and down the border.

The Collapse of the Southwest Border

What 10,000 arrests a day means is that our southwest border is collapsing. Texas cities of Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville have issued emergency declarations, as has New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has deployed a new National Guard unit, the Texas Tactical Border Force, to try to “deter” illegal crossings. However, rolling out razor wire along stretches of the Rio Grande isn’t going to cut it as a long-term strategy.

The Ineffectiveness of Biden’s New Policy

The Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds more U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) personnel to the border as part of a new policy to process migrants within days of their arrival and deport them if they fail an initial screening is not a solution. The USCIS agents will be joined in this effort by some 1,500 military troops, not to enforce the border but to do data entry, mostly. The new Biden policy amounts to little more than a propaganda campaign to make it look like the administration is doing something about the crisis. It does nothing to reduce the use of catch-and-release as America’s de facto border policy.

The Need to Fix Our Immigration Laws

Our entire corpus of immigration law is woefully defective and has been for many years. It’s this defective underlying body of law that made bureaucratic expedients like Title 42 necessary to control the border. If we don’t fix the law, though, we’ll never be able to fix the border. The only thing that will end the ongoing border crisis is to fix our asylum and immigration laws so they can’t be exploited by illegal immigrants making bogus asylum claims. Programs like Title 42, or even the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy, are stop-gaps at best. To secure the border, we’re going to need laws that mandate a secure border, which means closing the asylum loopholes, immediately deporting those who cross illegally, and building a really high wall.

About the Author

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.