CV NEWS FEED // President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order aimed at quelling the unprecedented border crisis that has exponentially intensified since the beginning of his presidency.
The president’s critics immediately slammed the move as a “campaign stunt” and a “desperate” attempt to save face amid mounting criticism of his border policies ahead of the November election.
NBC News reported that Biden’s executive action “will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry.”
Per an unnamed member of the Biden administration, the “shutdown would go into effect immediately since [the 2,500-encounters-per-day] threshold has already been met,” NBC added. “The border would reopen only once that number falls to 1,500.”
A Wednesday Axios report noted that “there have been an average of 3,700 illegal crossings a day over the past three weeks.”
Upon signing the order, Biden declared: “[T]he border is not a political issue to be weaponized.”
“So, today, I’m moving past Republican obstruction and using the executive authorities available to me as president to do what I can on my own to address the border,” he said.
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Former President Donald Trump immediately offered his own critique of Biden’s executive order.
“Crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of our country by far, has totally surrendered our southern border,” Trump said in a video statement Tuesday. “His weakness and extremism have resulted in a border invasion like we have never seen before.”
“Now after nearly four years of his failed, weak leadership, pathetic leadership, Crooked Joe Biden is pretending to finally do something about the border,” Trump continued. “But in fact, it’s all about show because he knows we have a debate coming up in three weeks.”
“The truth is Joe Biden’s executive order won’t stop the invasion,” the former president added. “It would actually make the invasion worse.”
Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, agreed.
“It took [Biden] 1,231 days to start using executive authority to combat the southern border crisis,” McConnell noted on X (formerly Twitter) late Tuesday afternoon. “But his order would still allow more than 900,000 people to cross the border every year. The American people are not fools. They know this is too little, too late.”
On Wednesday, the National Review’s editorial staff penned an op-ed blasting the president’s executive order as “desperate.”
“[Biden] can blow more smoke through the use of executive orders, in a desperate attempt to hide the mess his administration created,” the editors wrote.
“The claim is that the new executive order will impel administration officials to close the border once the seven-day average of illegal entries hits 2,500 per day,” the op-ed stated. “But there are many loopholes that allow the administration to avoid this and continue to admit bogus asylum seekers at a rate of over a million per year.”
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“The executive order would not address the 1,500 migrants per day who use the CBP One app at ports of entry,” the editors continued:
It doesn’t affect the tens of thousands of migrants a month who fly directly to the United States and are “paroled” into the country, via a kind of rolling amnesty for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The executive order does little to combat the pipeline of asylum seekers who come from countries outside of the Western Hemisphere.
Ukrainians, Russians, Afghans, and Eritreans have been pioneering a path of flying to South America and then crossing the formerly impassable Darién Gap on foot before trekking through Mexico to the U.S. border. The U.S. encountered 6,000 Chinese nationals crossing the Mexican border in December 2023 alone.
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Washington Free Beacon Senior Investigative Reporter Joseph Simonson noted that according to an internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo, Biden’s order “is full of exemptions for migrants who claim asylum.”
Simonson reported:
Any “noncitizen,” the memo states, may be permitted to enter under “urgent humanitarian” conditions.
…
Those “humanitarian” conditions, according to the memo, include asylum claims. If a migrant claims a fear of “acute medical emergency,” “an imminent and extreme threat to life or safety,” or is a “victim of a severe trafficking in persons,” they may enter the country. Deportation officers stationed on the southern border, Department of Homeland Security guidelines state, “will not determine whether noncitizens are subject to an exception to the limitation of asylum eligibility.”
Even after a migrant is placed in expedited removal, the memo states, he may still claim a “fear of return.” Examples of those fears, which the memo states may be non-verbal, include “I am afraid to go to [country].” At that point, the migrant would be temporarily relieved of an immediate deportation.
The Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries called Biden’s executive action a “campaign stunt.”
“President Biden’s executive order to let in almost one million additional illegal aliens per year is a campaign stunt that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” she stated.
“After months of lying to the American people by saying he’s ‘done all he can do’ to secure the border, he’s rolling out an unserious executive order to try to save his sinking poll numbers in the wake of the massively unpopular invasion he has orchestrated,” Ries went on:
More than 10 million people have entered the country on his watch as a direct consequence of his abuse of our parole system, refusal to detain illegal aliens, and empowerment of open-border activists like impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. For more than three years, Joe Biden has aided a national security crisis at our borders to appease the far Left. Today’s executive order will not rewrite that history and Americans will not be fooled.
Ries serves as the Director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center. She is a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.
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