The border crisis of the past four years will repeat itself unless members of Congress understand the “failure” of President Joe Biden’s border policies, according to Rep. Michael Guest, chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement.
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” Guest, R-Miss., told The Daily Signal on Tuesday shortly before the start of a subcommittee hearing, “Consequences of Failure: How Biden’s Policies Fueled the Border Crisis.”
“To be clear,” he said as the hearing began, “this hearing is not about looking back just for the sake of looking back, but instead is about learning from past failures so that Congress can work together to pass meaningful and lasting solutions to secure our border.”
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Some of Guest’s Democrat colleagues on the panel were critical of the hearing, accusing Republicans on the subcommittee of dwelling on the past.
“Mr. Chairman, we’re looking at the past,” Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., said. “I’d like to look at the future and what the challenges are for us at the border in this nation.”
Under the previous administration, Biden gave illegal aliens the five things they want when coming to America, Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told members of the subcommittee.
“When coming to the U.S., illegal aliens generally want to enter our country, remain here, work here, send money home, and bring or have family here,” she said.
From parole tools, such as the CBP One mobile application, to providing work authorization for illegal aliens, to funneling federal funds to nongovernmental organizations that arrange “transportation, shelter, health care, documentation, legal services, and other ‘wraparound services’ for the aliens,” the Biden administration provided migrants with every incentive needed to cross the border illegally, Ries said.
“We, the U.S. taxpayers, were paying for our own national destruction,” Ries said.
The Mexican cartels exploited the lack of border security and enforcement under the Biden administration, according to Ammon Blair, a senior fellow with the Secure and Sovereign Texas Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“These cartels function as hybrid threats,” Blair said. “Closely resembling their Middle Eastern counterparts, they employ terror as a political weapon, control territory, corrupt or co-opt institutions, and use violence strategically to shape governance outcomes. Their war is not against the rival state, it is against the very concept of law, sovereignty, and national borders.”
Jon Anfinsen, executive vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, also testified, telling the House panel that the “world” was essentially encouraged to “illegally cross our borders,” which in turn “caused our agents to be sidelined, left unable to do their jobs.”
The jobs of Border Patrol agents shifted “from that of law enforcement to that of processing asylum claims, sitting behind computers on a virtual assembly line while illegal aliens disappeared into the country,” Anfinsen said.
Customs and Border Protection encountered about 10 million illegal aliens at the border under the Biden administration, and an additional 2 million known “gotaways” entered the country.
Encounters of illegal aliens at the southern border have sharply declined under the Trump administration, according to Customs and Border Protection data, falling from 96,036 in December to 61,447 in January, and down to 11,709 by February.
With the decline of illegal border crossings, Guest says, Congress can now begin to look at immigration reform.
“And so now that we’ve been able to bring those numbers down to a record level, I believe that we can now incorporate that second component, which is going to be reworking the immigration laws to make sure we close those loopholes, but also to make sure that we are creating legal pathways for citizenship for the people who do things the right way,” Guest said.
Tuesday’s hearing was the first in a series. During the 119th Congress, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement is “not only going to be talking about the actions of the past and moving forward, we’re going to really be focusing on maritime security as well,” Guest said.
With greater security at the southern border, policy leaders in Washington and law enforcement think the cartels will use other methods, such as shipping routes, to bring drugs into the country illegally.
“We’re going to be focused during this Congress on a lot of the drug cartels, the transnational criminal organizations,” Guest said.
“They’re both involved in drug smuggling and human trafficking,” the Mississippi lawmaker said, adding, “We all want to see that we live in communities that are safe from fentanyl, that we live in communities that are safe from violent criminals who have come across the border.”
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