Everyone my parents’ age remembers where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot. Their parents remember where they were when imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Last Saturday, July 13, shortly after 6 p.m., I was sitting by the pool reading the news on my phone. I bet you remember where you were, too.
In an instant, we saw the attempted assassination of a former and perhaps future American president.
Donald Trump came within half an inch of being the fifth president to be felled by an assassin’s bullet; he is now one of several more who were wounded in an assassination attempt.
Trump’s reaction under fire at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the photographs taken in the shooting’s immediate aftermath, already are iconic reminders of an awful day.
The instant coverage from much of the news media seemed to minimize the gravity and tragedy of the situation. A CNN headline—“Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally”—is one example.
The nadir of “Republicans pounce”-style journalism was this headline from Newsweek: “MAGA responds with outrage after Donald Trump injured at Pennsylvania rally.” That headline didn’t last long but was captured by an X user.
There will be plenty of time to investigate how one deranged, 20-year-old man was able to get this close to changing U.S. history and still managed to murder a 50-year-old husband and father as he heroically protected his family in the stands. The shooter also wounded two others in the crowd.
After such an awful event, and with so many questions to answer, not a lot of people focused on what Trump was saying at the time. He was talking about the problem of mass illegal immigration.
As the nearly fatal shot rang out, Trump had just turned to point at a large chart that was immediately familiar to those of us who write about border security issues.
Many like it exist, but that particular chart was produced by the office of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has used it in multiple congressional hearings to illustrate the unprecedented scale of the man-made problem at the U.S. borders.
Here is the same chart, from the website for Johnson’s Senate office:
The chart on illegal immigration, with its distinct orange and blue colors, shows the peaks and troughs of Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens at the southwest border from 2012 to 2024.
Bold text on the chart points out key presidential policy decisions and what happened in response.
In 2012, when President Barack Obama announced a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to prevent deportation of children brought here by illegal immigrants, there were about 40,000 encounters a month with illegal aliens at the southwest border. But Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens hit around 70,000 a month by mid-2014, at which time Obama declared a “humanitarian crisis.”
Trump, as president for two years, in January 2019 implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols, popularly known as “Remain in Mexico,” along with a range of other efforts to deter, detain, and deport those caught crossing illegally into the U.S.—as our law requires.
Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens at and between ports of entry on the southern border briefly spiked to almost 150,000 in one month of 2019, but by the end of Trump’s term monthly encounters with illegal aliens were down to just over 30,000.
That’s not perfect, but it shows the effect on the ground of good strategy, tactics, and intra-agency cooperation in enforcing border security and immigration law. It also sets the stage, graphically, for what happened next.
President Joe Biden took office with promises to stop construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, end the Remain in Mexico policy, pause deportations for at least 100 days, and encourage a “surge” of supposed asylum claimants at the southern border.
Shortly after his inauguration Jan. 20, 2021, Biden issued a raft of executive orders undoing everything previous presidents of both parties had found effective at reducing mass illegal entry.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, set restrictive new enforcement priorities for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a subagency of DHS. Mayorkas also put onerous procedures in place that kicked interior enforcement of immigration law to the back-most of burners.
The results of these policies may be seen on the enlarged chart to which Trump turned his head Saturday evening with miraculous timing. From Biden’s first day in office, Johnson’s chart looks like the birth of a volcano. Monthly encounters with illegal aliens at the southwest border take off into the chart’s higher reaches, averaging 150,000 a month, then over 200,000, then 250,000.
For December 2023, the chart shows the highest ever total in American history—over 300,000 encounters of inadmissible aliens at the southwest border. It looks like the Himalayas at the far-right corner of the chart, compared to rolling hills just a few years earlier.
Most Americans are still somewhat in shock at how close we came to losing one of the men who will be president in 2025. Despite disgraceful behavior by some who ought to know better in the news media, social media, and politics, the majority of right-thinking Americans surely agree that violence is abhorrent and its use for political ends is an intolerable assault on democracy.
We deserve the chance to debate, disagree, and ultimately settle vital policy questions without denigrating each other to the point of inciting violence.
Once the shock of July 13 wears off, we again will debate the policy questions of our time and select those we think best able to address them. Along with the economy, illegal immigration has become one of the most important issues for voters in the Nov. 5 election.
A growing number of voters in both major parties are telling pollsters that those who entered the country illegally shouldn’t be allowed to stay, and that we should deport those who are ordered removed after due process.
It’s not my place to tell anyone how to vote. I just hope that whoever does sit in the Oval Office and in the halls of Congress in January will bear Johnson’s chart in mind.
I hope the new U.S. president and those in Congress will understand that the policies of presidents—far more than political, environmental, and other events in far-off countries—are what determine how many illegal aliens likely will attempt to enter the United States in the months and years ahead.
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 like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Read Other BorderLine Columns:
How Noncitizens Get to Vote in US Elections and How to Stop It
Yes, America Is Exceptional. Happy 4th of July!
Supreme Court Confirms No ‘Right’ for Foreigners to Enter US
Biden’s 5 Favorite Fudges on Immigration Law
Illegal Immigration Crisis Drives European Voters to Conservatives
