In his first days in office, President Joe Biden stopped building the border wall, ended the Remain in Mexico program that kept alleged asylum seekers out until they had proved their case, and started mass-releasing people caught illegally entering the U.S. He also perverted the purpose of immigration parole to bring tens of thousands more aliens in every month. Despite his attempt to downplay the problem and shirk responsibility in Thursday’s State of the Union, these policies have led directly to our current border crisis.
Since Biden took office in 2021, the U.S. has let in around as many inadmissible, unvetted aliens as the entire population of El Salvador. In Fiscal 2023 alone, Border Patrol caught 15,267 people at the border who had criminal convictions. These would almost all be convictions in U.S. courts, since we don’t have access to most countries’ criminal records.
But how many criminals are among the 600,000 or more “gotaways” that sneak through every year, or have been released or paroled because their criminal records were unknown to U.S. officials?
Conservatives have warned for years that Biden’s open borders and mass releases would bring increased crime and cost American lives. We pointed to places like New York City, where corrupt progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg regularly releases illegal aliens from jail without bail, as he did to eight young men accused of attacking police officers this January.
We cited cities like Chicago, where just last month police found a stash of over 500 fake identity cards when arresting a group of Mexicans that were hiring Venezuelan illegal immigrants to shoplift from stores on the Miracle Mile.
Biden’s immigration-driven crime wave is now arriving in America’s suburbs and small towns with devastating results. The past two weeks made the consequences of unchecked open borders clear: crime, chaos and death in the American heartland.
