The Biden administration has an odd way of measuring success. The White House slipped the latest reports of record encounters with illegal migrants into the Friday news with hopes that they would be ignored over the weekend, and for good reason.
Then it claimed that “new border enforcement measures are working.”
January, despite being a historically quiet month for border crossings, still posted a record unseen for decades. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials reported a new high of 156,274 encounters, which marked an increase even over last year’s blistering pace.
There were more than 156,000 migrant encounters in January and Biden claimed new border measures are "working."
FAIR's Hauman said, "It's one big shell game…This is the end result — lower numbers. It’s all a sham and it’s illegal."https://t.co/uy03MdMlIO
— FAIR (@FAIRImmigration) February 13, 2023
The most recent number is nearly double the 78,414 encounters recorded in Jan. 2021, the last month of former President Donald Trump’s tenure.
Government officials desperately sought to put a positive spin on the figures by noting they were far below December’s record 251,978 encounters. There are multiple problems with making this argument.
First, January and February are normally slow months at the border. Furthermore, the figure hit a high mark not seen for decades, so comparisons with other early year totals prove that the tally is nothing to crow about.
Still, the Biden administration is eager to show any evidence that new border measures it recently introduced are working. The White House instituted a drastic change that eased entry for tens of thousands of migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti.
The new program allows 30,000 per month into the country legally if they did not illegally cross, have a U.S. sponsor, and meet other requirements.
This coincides with an expansion of Title 42 restrictions to include illegal migrants from these countries. The change met resistance from the left, with open borders proponents claiming the Title 42 expansion harms migrants’ ability to claim asylum.
Meanwhile, conservative observers believe that the new program presents nothing more than “one big shell game.”
The Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) RJ Hauman told Fox News Digital that the White House finally believes the border crisis is hurting them politically. Their response, he contended, was to enact “unlawful parole abuse and processing at ports of entry through an app.”
Hauman called it a “sham” and “illegal.”
Though the Biden White House appears to realize that the border is indeed a mess, shuffling the numbers around does nothing to solve the crisis. The American people are not fooled by this rearrangement, and Washington still refuses to enact real solutions to illegal migration.
