At a campaign stop in Southern Texas, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) unveiled his proposals for mitigating the rates of illegal immigration under President Joe Biden. Promising a “more aggressive” approach than that of former President Donald Trump, DeSantis called for a welcome change that is sure to please local officials.
"I can tell you, as president, we are going to fully deputize all state and local governments to be able to enforce immigration law," DeSantis said. "You will be able to have that authority.”
BIDEN MAY BUCK BIPARTISAN VOTE TO KEEP MORTGAGE OVERHAUL IN PLACE
This deputization proposal is a good idea.
The federal government is tasked with defending our national boundaries. The Constitution provides that it “shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” The Biden administration, as DeSantis pointed out, has utterly failed.
The rate of illegal border crossings has broken records two fiscal years in a row thanks to policies that reduce deportations and other basic enforcement methods. This month, the government claimed to have significantly decreased the number of border encounters, but it used misleading statistics that policy experts debunked. The immigrants it releases into the country to languish in the court system, if they receive court dates at all, are simply not recorded as border “encounters” so long as officials process them in some way.
To complete the mockery of our system, Biden’s agencies pay millions of taxpayer dollars to nonprofit groups that help migrants find paths to the border or avoid deportation. The executive branch also considers it a higher priority to investigate Texas for supposed civil rights offenses against illegal immigrants than to enlist its help on border security. Part of the unprecedented nature of this crisis is that federal officials are in an adversarial relationship with states because they openly side with those who break our laws.
This has left states and counties wondering what to do as the federal government skirts its constitutional obligation. There are legal questions surrounding the idea of nonfederal officials unilaterally enforcing immigration law, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has tested some of those limits. Dozens of counties have urged him to use emergency war powers under the “invasion” clause of the Constitution, which failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake promised to do in Arizona. But Abbott has refused due to his understandable concerns about federal retaliation, using the border “invasion” as more of a rhetorical point while highlighting Biden’s failures.
We don’t have time for indecision or inaction. Migrants are dying while trying to make it to the border. Deadly opioids and dangerous criminals are flooding the country. A leader such as DeSantis would make clear that state authorities can enforce immigration law with "appropriate force" without begging federal agencies for permission each time. As hundreds of thousands of border crossers evade capture and deportation, this federal collaboration with local law enforcement would give illegal immigrants far more to worry about than Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, discouraging their migration in the first place.
On Tuesday, Trump claimed DeSantis’s border security strategy is “basically” a copy of his own. I hope that’s true because every 2024 presidential candidate should run on it.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.