U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say the number of immigrants arriving at the border in December 2020 has jumped 80 percent because of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign promise to loosen controls at the border.
“We’ve seen the negative impact of the proposed policy changes,” Customs and Border Protection Chief Operating Officer and Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said Tuesday (Jan. 5), Breitbart News reported.” Criminal groups and human traffickers are spreading the idea that we will open our borders.”
Biden’s campaign promise “is not an immigration strategy, it’s an open borders strategy,” Morgan said, adding, “The immigrants know, and more importantly, the traffickers know… I was asked, ‘What do you think is going to happen,’ and I said It’s already happening now.”
In December 2020, a whopping 74,000 migrants arrived at the U.S. border. Morgan said the number is “arguably crisis level,” “but the reason it doesn’t feel like a crisis is because we have (President Trump‘s) authority, regulations and policies to deal with that number.”
He added that the numbers would become a border crisis if Biden were to cancel Trump’s border reforms, as his campaign claimed. “You take away that (ability to respond), then 2,500 (arrivals) a day, overnight, will become a crisis, and that’s what we’re worried about.”
Morgan said the arrivals include spouses and children of migrants from Central America. “We’re now seeing people from the Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras), mainly still single adults, but we’re also seeing families and unaccompanied foreign children. So now, we’re back to a 50-50 split, about 50 percent Mexican and 50 percent from other countries.”
For now, Morgan’s deputies are communicating with Biden’s deputies, who want the Biden administration to actually listen to experts, hear the facts and then make adjustments to protect America.
The Biden team seems receptive to the suggestion. Morgan said, “They’ve taken back what they promised to do before. Mr. Biden himself said in a recent (response) to a set of questions that he would not do what he promised to do (on) ‘day one’ of his inauguration because he knew it would create a crisis. Glad to hear that … but it doesn’t alleviate my concern that this just kicks the crisis to a later date. There has to be a real reform of their open borders strategy.”
Biden has claimed to end Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) on “day one” of his administration, which is seen as the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Democrat-backed “catch and release” policy. The MPP allows 90 percent of illegal border crossers to either be deported quickly or returned to Mexico pending asylum applications.
Morgan said Biden wants to “stop the construction of the border wall, stop deportations for 100 days, expand DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), end the MPP, provide free health care, amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally, and the list goes on and on. It’s not an immigration strategy, it’s an open borders strategy.” “Who wouldn’t try to enter the country?”
On Dec. 22, 2020, a senior adviser to Biden’s team changed his tune, saying it would take time to make certain changes to Trump’s immigration policies and that (illegal) immigrants should not expect the border to be “completely open” immediately.
Morgan said that Biden’s claim of delay was “not good enough, not nearly good enough.
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