Customs and Border Protection reports that Border Patrol apprehended 199,777 persons at the US southwest border in July. This represents an increase of 21,000 over June and was 23,000 higher than our dire forecast of one month ago. Further, July apprehensions were nearly twice the level of the next highest July in the last twenty years, that is, July 2000 of the Clinton administration, when 114,000 migrants were arrested.
We can now make plausible forecasts for the balance of the fiscal and calendar year based upon 2000, the prior worst year in US history, and using historical averages for the back end of the year.
For the fiscal year ending September 30th, 2021 will eke out the record as the worst year for southwest border apprehensions, if the precedent of the Clinton administration in 2000 holds. By contrast, if the balance of the year follows historical averages, fiscal year 2021 will rank as only the fourth worst year in US history. That this is even possible is solely due to the efforts of the Trump administration, the last four months of which count for fiscal 2021 and whose apprehensions were much lower than since the Biden administration took office.
Calendar year 2021 will almost certainly be recorded, by a large margin, as the worst in US history for southwest border apprehensions. The administration is currently tracking 1.75 - 1.80 million apprehensions at the border, as much as 200,000 higher than the next closest year. Barring a draconian change of policy, a record for the calendar year is all but in the bag.
Inadmissibles -- those presenting at official crossing points without appropriate documentation -- looks even worse, albeit at much lower absolute levels. These are now running at three times the level of March, nearly 13,000 for the month of July. That these numbers are rocketing up month after month strongly suggests that Customs is letting many through without proper documentation. For migrants, presenting at official crossing points without papers appears to be another viable channel for entering the US interior.
To all this, DHS Secretary Mayorkas commented yesterday, "If our borders are the first line of defense, we're going to lose and this is unsustainable...We can't continue like this, our people in the field can't continue and our system isn't built for it." To which one agent replied, "For those of us who have been around here long enough, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We've had this happen before. We know exactly how to shut it down. We need to make illegal entry illegal."
I am frankly astounded that Secretary Mayorkas still holds his job. He should have been fired two months ago, and likely will be in the next two months. Time and again, we see the Biden administration forced into policy reversals. Defunding the police proved toxic at the polls, prompting Press Secretary Jen Psaki to rather ludicrously claim that it was a Republican idea. Abandoning Afghanistan is unraveling into tragedy, validating the US military's resistance to pulling out. The Guardian today excoriated the President for asking OPEC to pump more oil: "If this is the stance of the Biden administration then its decarbonisation agenda has been well and truly buried," the Guardian seethed.
All of this was entirely foreseeable.
On the border, too, the administration will eventually be forced to reverse policy. It is hard to see this happening without Mayorkas' scalp.
But the damage will have been done. There has been considerable sympathy on both sides of the aisle for DACA recipients. Biden's open border policy has, however, politicized and weaponized this group by signaling that the administration simply intends to gut border enforcement to undermine US conservatives. This is not about humane treatment, but about amnesty as war by other means. Talk about rebranding! Do my friends at the NILC or fwd.us believe amnesty will pass under reconciliation? And if it does, do they expect Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who is from Arizona, the home of SB 1070, to vote for any kind of amnesty while the border is hemorrhaging migrants? And then what do they expect of Republicans? Republicans will be able to brush off calls for amnesty with a simple condition: When the Democrats remove the two million illegals Biden's border policy will have allowed in, they will agree to amnesty. As we know, that's not going to happen. As a consequence, the Biden administration's border policy is an unfolding disaster for undocumented immigrants, particularly long-time residents.
Can anyone in the administration at all see one move ahead on the chessboard? Or is it as Democratic strategist James Carville claims: “These [progressive] people are kind of nice people. They’re naive and all into language and identity, and that’s all right...but they’re not winning elections." Is that the level of sophistication of the Biden administration? I hope not, but I fear so.