Roughly 40 days ahead of the November election, President Joe Biden claimed that an executive order he issued this summer has reduced illegal border crossings by 60%.
In an amended Sept. 27, 2024, Proclamation 10773 (Securing the Border), he claims a June 3 executive order he issued “suspended and limited the entry of certain noncitizens into the United States across the southern border during times of high border crossings.”
Following his directive, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland issued an interim final rule claiming to limit asylum eligibility for certain noncitizens who illegally enter the country, which he says “already produced significant results.”
“As of the end of the last calendar month, the average number of encounters by the United States Border Patrol at our southwest border between ports of entry has decreased by 59% compared to the period after the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule began to apply on May 12, 2023, and before Proclamation 10773 and the IFR went into effect. July and August 2024 were the lowest 2 months of encounters between ports of entry since September 2020.”
He also claims DHS “removed or returned 70 percent of single adults and family members, including more than 119,000 individuals to more than 140 countries; has more than tripled the percentage of noncitizens processed through expedited removal; and has decreased the percentage of noncitizens encountered at the southwest border who are released by United States Border Patrol pending their removal proceedings by 52 percent.”
Since his June 3 executive order was so successful, his new order is discontinuing “the suspension and limitation on entry in that proclamation” only after Mayorkas determines “there have been 28 consecutive calendar days in which the 7-consecutive-calendar-day average of encounters is less than 1,500.”
The order amends the Immigration and Nationality Act and gives Mayorkas 14 days to make this determination. It also amends his previous order to include unaccompanied minors from non-contiguous and contiguous countries when calculating illegal border crosser encounters.
In August, The Center Square first reported that more than 12.5 million illegal border crossers were reported since fiscal 2021, including two million who evaded capture. That number excludes the now more than 1.3 million released through at least two parole programs. House Republicans impeached Mayorkas for these programs and state attorneys general sued to stop them, arguing they are illegal.
Through two of them, roughly 813,000 foreign nationals were processed into the country through the CBP One app and nearly 530,000 through CHNV (Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans), according to CBP data.
Combined, they total nearly 14 million. These numbers exclude an unknown number released through roughly a dozen other programs that Republicans in Congress argue are illegal. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, filed a bill requiring DHS to publicize how many are released through all parole programs.
“Despite the false narrative they’re attempting to project, the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on,” U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., who led the charge to impeach Mayorkas, said. “This administration is orchestrating a massive shell game, encouraging otherwise-inadmissible aliens to cross at ports of entry instead of between them – thereby creating a façade of improved optics for the administration, but in reality imposing a growing burden on our communities.”
Former acting CBP chief and former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan agrees, telling The Center Square that the president last year began “shifting the crisis from in between the ports of entry to the ports of entry themselves,” while at the same time calling the change “a new legal pathway and claiming victory. It’s a perversion and violation of the law. A big lie. One government sponsored shell game.”
The president’s latest claim “that the ‘numbers are going down’ is another intentional effort to mislead the American people. In reality, it’s nothing more than a politically driven shell game. Here’s how it works – the Biden administration made a lucrative deal with migrants that if they refrain from illegally entering through our country’s back door in the middle of the night, the administration will circumvent and violate the law in an effort to allow them to walk through our front door and call it a ‘legal pathway.’ I assure you it’s anything but lawful.
“The heart of their gamesmanship is that they haven’t stopped the flow of illegal migration at all, but rather they’ve simply diverted it from in-between the ports of entry to the ports of entry themselves. As the administration brags about 60% reduction in the flow of illegal aliens in-between the POEs, what you haven’t heard them mention is they’ve increased the flow at the POEs by 220%.”
Biden issued this order after he issued another order earlier this month extending a national emergency due to terrorism that’s been ongoing for 23 years. He did so as the greatest number of individuals on the terrorist watch list were apprehended under his watch of 1,856, first reported by The Center Square.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has demanded answers on how many have been flown into the country, expressing alarm that Americans “are living on borrowed time” after intelligence officials have issued numerous terrorist warnings citing the border crisis.
