"End. Stop. Done. Over." Just three years ago, Joe Biden promised that "there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration." With his refusal to continue land confiscations along the border, Biden positioned himself to the left of even his former boss's administration, which at least continued the construction of some Bush-era border fencing.
"Not going to do it," Biden said in 2020 of Trump's efforts to build the wall. "Withdraw the lawsuits. We’re out. We’re not going to confiscate the land."
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He tried (maybe), but in a stunning about-face, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on Thursday that it was waiving a grand total of 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow the construction of "physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas."
Just don't call those "physical barriers" a wall.
Biden's 180-degree turn is less a change of heart and more the octogenarian's basic calculation of dollars, common sense, and the impending doom and gloom in the polls. Worst for Biden is that the complaints about the border crisis are no longer even primarily coming from Republicans. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City who obviously is no white supremacist, has escalated from publicly begging the president to do something about the issue to straight-up flying to Colombia to figure out for himself what the hell is going on.
Until Biden took office, the record for the most border crossings in a single year was set in 2000, when Border Patrol recorded 1.7 million encounters. The record was then surpassed in 2021 with 1.96 million encounters and then again in 2022 with 2.7 million encounters. Without the final month of fiscal 2023, border crossings were already at 2.8 million. The influx from the last year alone is equivalent to nearly 1% of the entire U.S. population.
To understand Gov. Greg Abbott's (R-TX) gambit to ship migrants to sanctuary cities and states, we need not look at the migrant import capital of the country. Let's just consider the case of Chicago.
Chicago (population: 2.7 million) has received roughly 15,000 migrants since last year. According to the Economist, two-thirds of those migrants are still in city accommodations, 1,500 of whom are camping on the floors of the city's police stations and another 500 of whom are sleeping in O'Hare International Airport. This modest share of migrants has cost the city $250 million and is projected to be responsible for one-third of its $500 million deficit next year.
And Chicago is a drop in the bucket. For reference, more than 118,000 migrants have arrived in New York City (population: 8.5 million) since last year. In El Paso (population: 678,000), the Democratic mayor estimates that 2,000 migrants are now arriving each day. In other words, El Paso is receiving in two months what New York got in a full year.
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Voters, of course, have noticed. According to Marquette, Trump has a 24-point lead over Biden when voters are asked which candidate is better on immigration and border security. NBC News gives the GOP more broadly an 18-point edge over Democrats, and ABC News found that Biden is 39 points underwater among voters evaluating their approval of his handling of the issue.
Has Biden simply learned that the empathetic and moral approach to border security is to not incentivize troves of human trafficking rings to cruise with coyotes through cartel-controlled territory to live on the hopes of local government largesse? Probably not. But has he read the tea leaves, the internal polling, and the balance sheets about to break the budgets of blue city-states? Undoubtedly so.