The Last Year of Biden’s Border Crisis

Welcome to the 52nd edition of “The BorderLine”! For the past year, every week, I have tried to capture the unprecedented nature of the Biden-Harris administration’s migration ideology, which mostly boils down to letting in millions more foreign nationals at the border than Congress has ever authorized while severely limiting enforcement of immigration laws inside this country. With the patience of my editors at The Daily Signal, I have tried to bring readers a full picture of what is happening, why it’s happening, and what it means to all Americans.

This anniversary column is a good time to review some numbers. In “The BorderLine” No. 3, I looked at President Joe Biden’s border policies by the numbers, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. Nearly a year later, where are we?

Let’s start small and work up.

0 – The number of formal press conferences conducted by Vice President Kamala Harris since she became her party’s 2024 candidate for president, according to Fox News. Pew Research polling shows that immigration is the No. 1 issue for Donald Trump supporters—82% consider it a major issue, as do 39% of Harris supporters. There is clearly public interest in what both candidates would do about immigration if elected.

2 – The number of trips Biden and Harris—each—took to the southern border since their term began in 2021. Biden went to Texas in 2023 and 2024. And so-called border czar Harris, who was tasked by Biden to solve the “root causes” of illegal immigration back in 2021, went once in 2021 to meet with local groups who assist illegal immigrants and made a second visit just one week ago.

6.5 – The percentage of the total population of Nicaragua that has been encountered at U.S. borders since Biden took office, according to the chart below. Customs and Border Protection port inspectors and Border Patrol agents combined have also encountered 6% of Cuba’s entire population, almost 10% of Honduras’, and 4% of Haiti’s. Most of them were released at the border and allowed to enter the U.S., but many were allowed to fly into interior U.S. airports under Biden’s invented “parole” schemes.

13,000 – The number of aliens convicted of murder who are still in the United States. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre attempted to explain how this number is being “falsely represented.” Is it? The Associated Press claims the “numbers have been misconstrued without key context, because the figures span decades,” and some who are not in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody may be detained by state or local law enforcement. Some, perhaps, but not the majority.

NEW: KJP says the new ICE report that reveals 13,000 illegals convicted of m*rder have entered the country, has been “fact-checked,” can’t name a single fact check.

Doocy: 13,000 people convicted of m*rder have crossed the border illegally and are living among us.

KJP: That’s a… pic.twitter.com/HTol2XkqO5

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 30, 2024

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” consists of all aliens in criminal or immigration proceedings but not actually behind bars. The total docket was under 5 million cases at the end of fiscal year 2022, over 6 million cases a year ago, and is around 7 million now. This chart shows the projected growth of this non-detained population under the Biden-Harris administration.

435,719 – The number of aliens with known criminal convictions who are still in the United States. A year ago, it was 407,983. Note that these are only the convictions in the U.S. For all we know, some or many might have convictions in their home countries or other countries.

According to information that ICE gave to Rep, Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, recently, through the end of July, there were 662,556 aliens on the non-detained docket who were either convicted of crimes or facing criminal charges (those who solely committed the crime of illegally crossing the border are not included). Only around 15,000 of them were in ICE custody.

Among those roaming free in addition to the murderers were 62,231 individuals with assault charges or convictions and 56,533 with drug charges or convictions.

The Department of Homeland Security claims it has deported 180,000 people with criminal convictions since Biden took office, but many of those were simply turned around at the border, not arrested in the interior. The bottom line is that the Biden administration is letting criminal aliens in faster than they are removing them.

One reason for this is that ICE was given instructions from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that significantly restrict their enforcement efforts. Another is that ICE officers have regularly been pulled off enforcement duties to instead process the unprecedented numbers of aliens trying to get into the U.S.—all to feed what I call the “Mayorkas Migration Machine’s” relentless effort to release into the country as many inadmissible aliens as possible.

525,000 – The rough number of unaccompanied alien children Biden’s DHS has brought in since 2021 (see the chart below). It was 425,000 when I wrote “BorderLine” No. 3 a little less than a year ago. The government has spent billions of your tax dollars bringing them in and providing them with public services. In 2022, OpenTheBooks.com estimated that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was spending $18,000 per child, or almost $3 billion, back then for their initial settlement in the U.S.

Scandalously, hundreds of thousands of these minors have been released to people claiming to be their parents or guardians, but with little oversight. DHS hands them over to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Settlement. They’ve tried to check in with these kids since releasing them but failed to reach 90,000 of the self-proclaimed guardians. That means they’ve lost track of as many kids as there are in the entire Denver, Colorado, school system. And when the government does reach someone, they’re hardly verifying anything—just asking a few basic questions with no verification to make sure it’s true or that the kids are safe.

Many children become trafficked for sex or labor.

11 million – The number of illegal alien encounters at the border since Biden and Harris took office. That does not include those who crossed the border illegally but went undetected.

A year ago, I wrote that “On Mayorkas’ … watch, we have set the record for the most yearly illegal alien encounters in U.S. history. If those caught in 2023 formed a new city, it would the third biggest in America, behind only New York and Los Angeles.”

The number of “encounters” includes the 75,000 or so inadmissible aliens being paroled into the country per month. Of those caught at the border, we don’t know exactly how many were released into the country. In August 2023, The Wall Street Journal estimated that 75% of inadmissible aliens caught at the border entering illegally were let in by DHS. In December 2023, Mayorkas testified that they actually were releasing “over 85%.”

Even if you take the lower percentage, when you add to that the over total 2 million “gotaways” who entered without detection during the Biden-Harris administration (compared to a total of 415,000 for 2018, 2019, and 2020 combined during the Trump administration) and another 1.5 million let in by Biden’s parole programs, that could mean up to 9 million inadmissible foreign nationals—known in U.S. immigration law as “aliens”—are now living in the United States. That’s equivalent to the population of some entire countries—Austria, Hungary, or Israel, for example. Of course, that’s just the additions since Biden and Harris took office and doesn’t include the 12-20 million who were here illegally already.

It’s hard to imagine what these numbers will look like when it’s time to write “BorderLine” No. 104 a year from now, but only major policy changes can turn the trend away from our continued descent into an unmanageable migration morass.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.