Fact Check: Joe Biden Touts Senate Border Bill as ‘Toughest …Ever Seen’

President Joe Biden delivers remarks during a visit to the southern border, Thursday, Feb.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Neil Munro

CLAIM: President Joe Biden said the Senate leadership’s bipartisan February border bill “is the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.”

VERDICT: FALSE: The draft “border security” bill expanded doorways in the borders by mandating the release of migrants with work permits, and by failing to curb migrant pipelines created by Biden’s deputies.

President Joe Biden is defending his easy migration policies by claiming that Republicans sabotaged “a win for the American people” when they rejected the Senate leaders’ border bill.

On February 29, during a speech in Texas, he declared:  “You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen. So instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?”

Many Democrats push the same message. It is the “toughest border reform bill, the toughest border security bill, in decades,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told CBS on March 3.

The message is being hammered into voters by Biden-friendly media outlets and social media networks, including network TV news shows, NPR,  Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

But the complex, legal jargon in the bill minimized border barriers, mandated catch-and-release for migrants, protected Biden’s parole backdoor for wage-cutting employers, funded more aid for migrants, and even created an asylum highway overseen by pro-migration hires.

Border Shutdown

“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed,” Biden declared on January 26. “And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

The border shutdown claim was quickly debunked when the text was released.

In the text, the legislation set high thresholds for activation of the shutdown authority, allowed the border chief to cancel the shutdown, discounted many migrants, and also expired in three years.

The bill also said that border officials must process at least 1,400 migrants every day at the official ports of entry while the border is supposedly shut down.

The fiasco crippled the rollout of the bill, which had been drafted under the supervision of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D-NY) and Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

‘The border never closes …[and] claims must be processed at the ports,” said a tweet from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who helped draft the insider deal.

After the failure, McConnell announced his retirement from the GOP leadership.

Catch and Release

A primary enabler of the mass illegal migration is that migrants are confident they can repay their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels by getting jobs in the United States.

In his February 29 visit to the border, Biden described the migrants’ rational calculations: “When the criminal gangs said, ‘We’ll get you to the north for $8,000 bucks’ … they’re not going to pay the cartels thousands of dollars to make that journey knowing that they’ll be turned around quickly.”

But Biden is not turning the migrants back. So far, he has allowed at least 6.2 million migrants to walk through the border and into the U.S. jobs that pay the smuggling debts to the cartels.

Many of the migrants who are rejected at the border quickly sneak back in as “got-aways” because they know that Biden’s border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — has instructed immigration officers to not deport the migrants who reach jobs if they do not commit major crimes.

This federal “catch and release” policy enables the cartels’ labor-trafficking business of migrants north, cash south.

But the Senators’ border bill strengthened this conveyor belt of migrant labor and cartel cash by requiring border officers to release migrants who merely say they will apply for asylum.

The law creates a “new section 235B to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and create[s] something called “Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings” (PNRP),” former immigration judge Andrew Arthur wrote in Center for Immigration Studies report:

That section would allow the DHS secretary — based only on undefined “operational circumstances” — to send migrants to PNRP if they express a fear of persecution or request asylum …

Unlike section 235(b)(1) of the INA — which [now] mandates detention for illegal migrants who are subject to expedited removal, including those found to have valid credible fear claims — that PNRP process under proposed section 235B of the INA mandates release. Not “authorizes” release — mandates it.

Release for the adults in PNRPs would be premised on those aliens being placed on “alternatives to detention” (ATD), but even that rule is not absolute. Only the adult head of a household released under PNRP is subject to ATD, not other adults and not the children … ATD is a costly failure that does nothing to ensure that aliens appear for removal [deportation].

ATD is Biden’s alternative to the existing legal requirement that migrants be detained until their asylum cases are concluded. But ATD invites migrants because it allows them to get U.S. jobs and pay off their smuggling debts even when their asylum cases are entirely bogus.

The bill also allowed migrants to quickly get work permits — and thus better-paying jobs — instead of waiting roughly 120 days under current law.

Overall, the bill weakens existing curbs on migration by forcing border agents to follow a catch-and-release policy for nearly all migrants.

Asylum

Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, is using the current asylum law to help migrants get into the United States, get work permits, and get legal claims to stay.

Democrats argue that the Senate bill would raise the asylum standards. But they downplay the bill’s sections that would let Mayorkas hire 4,000 “Asylum Officers” to conduct migrant-friendly, fast-track asylum approvals outside a courtroom where government lawyers can push back.

“Look, there are some things in that bill that we should do, [such as] change the asylum standard,” Sen. Marco Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper on February 11. But, Rubio added:

The bill basically creates an asylum corps, OK? … Thousands of bureaucrats [4,300 Asylum Officers], basically agents, asylum agents, that would be empowered right at the border to either allow people into the country with an immediate work permit. Today, [migrants have] to wait six months. [If] you give them an immediate work permit, you’re going to have more people coming. That’s a huge magnet.

Or the [4,300 Asylum Officers have the] power to immediately release them and grant them asylum, which now puts them on a five-year path to citizenship, which is what a lot of Democrats want. They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into voters, into citizens, into voters, in the hopes that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in.

The bill also helps migrants get attornies to counter the government lawyers tasked with protecting Americans’ citizenship from mass migration.

“The alien[s are] entitled to an attorney during that process, but the American people aren’t,” Arthur noted, adding:

Congress should go back to the drawing board and figure out how it can force DHS to comply with the border mandates it currently has — to deter aliens from entering illegally, and to detain the ones who do. Until that’s figured out, nothing will make the crisis at the border any better.

The huge inflow of migrants has imposed huge pocketbook damage on the many millions of ordinary Americans — especially African Americans — who would gain if employers had to negotiate with them about wages, benefits, schedules, and technology-aided productivity

Parole 

Biden has also used the narrow “parole” doorway in the border to admit more than 1 million migrants for employers. Under prior presidents, only about 15,000 parole approvals were granted each year.

In September 2023, the Wall Street Journal described how a New York restaurant battered by the coronavirus crash disregarded local workers and instead imported cheap labor via the “Uniting for Ukraine” parole program:

Two years ago, Veselka, a Ukrainian diner in Manhattan’s East Village renowned for its pierogi, was so short on cooks and wait staff that owner Jason Birchard was ready to cut the restaurant’s hours and end table service. Then last year, the war in Ukraine broke out. The Biden administration launched a program to sponsor Ukrainian refugees to live and work temporarily in the U.S.

Since then, Birchard has sponsored 10 Ukrainians, mostly extended family members of his existing employees, and eight now work at his restaurant. “One of my biggest challenges postpandemic was hiring. Not so anymore,” he said. “It’s been a win-win for me.”

Many of the parole migrants are workers from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela.

Murphy’s tweet said the bill included:

A clarification of how humanitarian parole is used at the land borders, but NO changes to the President’s ability to bring in vetted, sponsored migrants through the program known as CNHV (Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela parole).

The “CHNV” parole program has brought in at least 320,000 work-ready migrants, many via airports,

Biden’s deputies are importing those workers despite a 1999 law that narrows the parole doorway, the 1964 immigration law that bars employers’ use of foreign workers,  a judge’s decision striking down one parole program, and the obvious pocketbook damage to Americans.

Funding

Democrats say the bill provided funding to hire many border officers to process migrants and extra money to deploy drug-detection gear.

But it also provides roughly $5 billion to help Democratic allies register, transport, and shelter migrants throughout the United States, despite widespread immigration-exacerbated poverty. Without the funding, Democratic-run cities will be forced to balance their desire for more poor migrants against the often-ignored needs of local American voters.

Fentanyl

Democrats are also accusing the GOP of blocking roughly $416 million for drug interdiction when they rejected the McConnell bill.

However, Biden’s deputies are reprogramming far greater amounts of money towards the non-profits that transport and shelter migrants in American cities.

Also, Biden’s deputies — such as Mayorkas and Secretary of State Tony Blinken — use their economic leverage as they negotiate with Mexico to manage the pace of the cross-border migration, not to block drug production and smuggling.

On February 29, after three years on the job, Mayorkas boasted that U.S. prodded Mexico to curb the migration:

Texas is seeing a reduction in encounters across — across the board over what we experienced in December and immediately before then.  The primary reason is the enhanced enforcement efforts on the part of the Mexican government.

The President had a conversation with the President of Mexico in December.  Secretary Blinken and I, with our Homeland Security Advisor, visited Mexico.  We spoke of the importance of really renewing their enforcement efforts.  They did.  We’ve seen a tremendous drop in the number of encounters across the southern border.

That secret deal will likely be discarded — although not the secret payoff to Mexico — if Biden wins in December. Both Mexico’s government and Mayorkas’ staff favor more migration into the United States.

Mayorkas is the leader of the Democratic Party’s ideological pro-migration faction. He has repeatedly explained his support for more migration by citing his migrant parents, his sympathy for migrants, his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners, and his willingness to put his priorities above the law.

But Mayorkas is also careful to pair his open-border ideology by arguing that it meets the claimed “needs” of U.S. businesses. Many investors and business groups support the profitable extraction of foreign workers, consumers, and renters from their poor countries into the U.S. economy.

He pushes his pro-migration priority regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans, the impact on U.S. children, or Americans’ legitimate and rational opposition.

“Tougher” than GOP Border Bill

The House GOP passed their comprehensive H.R. 2 immigration bill in May, and Biden’s staff promised to veto it for being too tough:

The bill would cut off nearly all access to humanitarian protections in ways that are inconsistent with our Nation’s values and international obligations. In addition, the bill would make processing less efficient by prohibiting the use of the CBP One mobile application to process noncitizens and restricting DHS’s parole authority, such that successful programs, like “Uniting for Ukraine,” would be prohibited. The bill would also reduce authorized funding for essential programs including the Shelter and Services Program that provides a critical source of funds for state and local governments and reduces pressure at the border.

A successful border management strategy must include robust enforcement at the border … and legal pathways to ensure that those in need of protection are not turned away, the veto statement said.

Politics

Democrats will insist they offer a moral and effective migration policy throughout the 2024 election.

That makes political sense because the polls show massive support for Trump’s policy of less migration.

Biden is expected to push the message in his March 7 State of the Union speech. It is already being pushed by many Democrats and sympathetic media outlets.

On March 6, for example, the New York Times editorial board stated the narrative for many ambitious journos:

The country witnessed a stark display of this devotion [to Donald Trump] recently during the clashes over negotiations for a spending bill. Republicans have long pushed for tougher border security measures, and Mr. Trump put this at the top of the party’s agenda. With a narrow majority in the House and bipartisan agreement on a compromise in the Senate, Republicans could have achieved this goal.

“There’s finally a bipartisan compromise that would help address at least some of those issues, congressional Republicans couldn’t get it done, because Donald Trump, who’s not even in elected office, killed it,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg declared on March 5.
“That is a fact,” the Democrat insisted.

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