U.S. Needs Immigration Enforcement, Not a Bad Border Bill

August 20, 2024

By Tom Homan and Dale Wilcox

According to the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) grants the president broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. All the authority that the Biden Administration needed to secure America’s border with Mexico is contained within that relatively brief section of statute.

But Team Biden refused to use the arrows already in its quiver and created an unprecedented border crisis. By some estimates, millions of unvetted foreign nationals have made their way over our border and disappeared into the interior of the United States, with the tacit compliance of the U.S. government.

Nevertheless, the radical, anti-borders contingent insists that the immigration anarchy that currently prevails across our country is entirely the fault of people who support border security. According to the “No Borders” buffoons, the Senate’s poorly-drafted and ill-considered Border Act of 2024 would have made everything all better by prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from exercising Section 1182(f) authority until after 4,000 illegal aliens jumped the border each week.

That’s right, the Border Act of 2024 would have decreased the ability of the president and the DHS to respond to border crises. If you feel like you’re being lied to, that’s because those who supported the Senate’s disastrous bill have been telling epic untruths about their border measure, all in a vain effort to convince the American public they were actually doing something to impede the never-ending stream of foreign nationals flooding into the U.S. from Mexico.

For too long, successive administrations have deliberately ignored the requirements of America’s immigration law (known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) whenever it was politically expedient to do so. Whether it was deliberately rendering grants of “Temporary Protected Status” permanent by refusing to terminate short-term offers of protection or creating the blatantly unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, there has been a tendency to play fast and loose with immigration rules in a way that would never be tolerated in any other field of law. Most of these actions were taken to curry political favor with groups other than the American public.

Far from being a cure-all, the Border Act of 2024 was a symptom of the problem. It would have promoted the interests of foreigners who want to live in the U.S. over those of the U.S. citizens to whom this country belongs. And that is unacceptable in a constitutional republic like the United States, which has government of the people, by the people, for the people. In plain English, that means one thing and one thing only: In America, politicians are supposed to work for the American public, not foreigners who would like to be Americans but don’t yet possess the rights of U.S. citizenship.

We are currently living in the most dangerous global security climate since the outbreak of World War II. Yet all of our nation’s borders are more porous than a kitchen strainer. And that is a recipe for disaster. As of 2021, at least 99 individuals with links to terrorism had been released into the United States, where they are free to plot heinous acts like the Boston Marathon bombing or the Pulse Nightclub shootings. The number of Chinese nationals apprehended by the Border Patrol is up by 7,000 percent and nobody knows how many of those individuals are in the employ of the Chinese army or intelligence services. Meanwhile, border authorities are regularly encountering young Iranian males of military age crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

It’s bad enough that our enemies are exploiting idiotic border policies to penetrate the interior of the United States. But criminal cartels are busy all along the frontier as well. Deadly fentanyl is pouring into American communities and U.S. citizens are being lost at the rate of approximately 75,000 per year to overdoses. Roughly 60,000 foreign men, women and children are trafficked into the U.S. annually where they are forced to perform unpaid labor at construction sites, slaughter houses, meat-processing facilities – or worse, they are consigned to sexual slavery, where they are robbed of even the most basic human dignity. Meanwhile, migrant gangs are bringing waves of violent crime to America’s inner cities.

But none of this is the result of anyone failing to vote for a ridiculous Senate bill that would have conditioned immigration enforcement on letting in massive numbers of illegal aliens. It is the direct result of the Biden Administration being entirely unwilling to use the authority it already possessed to protect American citizens. Because it would rather throw up its hands and blame its deliberate misfeasance on imaginary statutory restrictions that even the Supreme Court has emphatically said don’t exist.

In reality, the immigration fix that America needs most right now is federal leadership that is capable of seeing immigration enforcement as a national priority and is willing to use the ample authority already on the books to secure the border, deport immigration violators and protect U.S. citizens from illegal alien crime.

Tom Homan is a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

Also published at The Washington Times, August 20, 2024.