Border Control No Longer Racist!

It's been Trumped by politics

One of the first things Joe Biden did when assuming office was undoing a lot of the executive orders written by Trump in the previous administration. Many of those EOs dealt with the southern border, with the predictable effect of a massive rise in illegal immigrants claiming asylum.

Then Joe Biden spent the next three years claiming the border was secure and there was no problem with the massive rise in asylum claims. (Blue city mayors disagreed.)

But as we got closer to the 2024 election, Democrats realized the border was a massive issue to the American people, and attempted to shift the blame to Republicans. (“They aren’t passing our border bill!”) Biden then spent a couple months claiming that he had no power to close the border and that Congress needed to act.

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Edit — a perfect video documenting the ‘evolution’ of Biden’s border policy:

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But in the light of terrible polling and an election drawing ever nearer, today Biden proved he could have acted at any time during the last three+ years:

Facing mounting political pressure over the migrant influx at the U.S. southern border, President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry, according to a senior administration official.

The shutdown would go into effect immediately since that threshold has already been met, a senior administration official said. The border would reopen only once that number falls to 1,500. The president’s order would come under the Immigration and Nationality Act sections 212(f) and 215(a) suspending entry of noncitizens who cross the southern border into the United States unlawfully. 

Senior administration officials said Tuesday in a call with reporters that “individuals who cross the southern border unlawfully or without authorization will generally be ineligible for asylum, absent exceptionally compelling circumstances, unless they are accepted by the proclamation.”

Crazy what happens when the politics shift a little bit, isn’t it? During the Trump years, border enforcement was racist and cruel. Then suddenly the border was the fault of Republicans for not passing “the strongest border bill in history” — but now Biden is enacting measures that cap entries far lower than stalled bill would have.

This paragraph sums up the last 6 years:

In 2018, the Trump administration tried to enact similar border restrictions but courts blocked them. The Biden administration now expects to defend the executive order against legal challenges.

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Edit — Adding Trump’s response:

Edit 2 - Video of Biden’s statement: