Leading up to President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union speech, reporters speculated about how much time, if any, he would give to the southern border crisis.
The answer is now known.
Biden’s speech was one hour, 12 minutes and 40 seconds long — the eighth-longest State of the Union address of the last 60 years, and exceeded only by President Bill Clinton, four times, and President Donald Trump, three times.
Biden spent about 60 seconds on his open border debacle.
Some analysts said his brief, one-minute reference proved he is indifferent to America’s eroded sovereignty that the border chaos created.
Others claimed the border mess is too embarrassing for Biden to acknowledge, and the less he said, the better for him, and his fellow Democrats.
At about the one-hour mark, Biden launched his foray into immigration.
“America’s border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts,” he shouted.
He then spoke more specifically about the direction in which he wants Congress to act.
“If we don’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers (and) essential workers,” he said.
Biden followed the well-traveled path that immigration expansionists have long trekked. Whatever problem society might face, the solution today, yesterday and always is comprehensive immigration reform that includes citizenship.
But granting amnesty to an unknown total of illegal immigrants already residing in the United States has no relationship to the sovereign-busting open border. Amnesty doesn’t equate to a secure border.
More to the point, no one on Capitol Hill knows the precise illegal immigrant total living within the interior. Estimates range from 12 million to 30 million.
Illegal aliens have to be unlucky to get deported under Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 72,177 illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2022, slightly more than the 59,011 deported in 2021. That number in turn marked a sharp drop from the 185,884 deported in 2020 and 267,258 in 2019.
Biden may want to dismiss the border, or he may be satisfied that his welcome-the-world policy is correct.
But the reality is that under Mayorkas, border agents have processed and released more than 5 million aliens into the interior.
Another million or so migrants, called gotaways, have slipped past agents, and are roaming among the general population. No one is certain of their identities, their intentions or their current whereabouts.
No one is looking for them either, and if they’re located, ICE cannot, as per a Mayorkas memo, deport them.
Mayorkas does not have the constitutional authority to rewrite settled immigration laws, but in the Biden administration, legality in immigration law is inconsequential.
The only thing Biden and Mayorkas know about immigration laws is that they refuse to enforce them.
The illegal alien border surge will cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion, and counting.
The $100 billion is the open border’s dollar cost. But the human cost, disregarded by Biden and Mayorkas is tragic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that more than 150 people die every day from overdoses related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Drug cartels have taken advantage of the open border to traffic fentanyl, and have built a multibillion business around their deadly drug.
“In my home county in Southern Arizona, fentanyl overdoses are the No. 1 cause of death among young people — outpacing car crashes,” Mexico-born Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., said in his Spanish-language rebuttal to Biden.
A post-State of the Union good news, bad news summary: amnesty has no chance to pass in the 118th Congress, but the nation will have to endure another two years of the lawless Biden administration, and its determination to destroy historic America.