On July 28, the New Yorker put its own unique spin on the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate’s immigration efforts, in an article headlined “The Real Story of Kamala Harris’ Record on Immigration”. While it offers unseen insights into White House border debates over the past four years, much of it is little than tendentious spin intended to cover the migrant surge.
H.Res. 1371. I’ll start where the article really begins, with a House resolution, H. Res. 1371, introduced by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) (chairman of the House Republican Conference) captioned “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border”.
The first clause in the resolution states that “President Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with working to address illegal immigration into the United States, including “root causes”, and came to be known colloquially as the Biden administration’s ‘border czar’”.
What follows in that resolution is largely a laundry list of disasters that have unfolded at the Southwest border in the past three and a half years.
Here’s how the New Yorker interprets the succeeding clauses in H.Res. 1371:
The rest of the resolution is replete with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other inanities. At one point, its authors claim that border crossings in May, 2024, were “higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump,” which is untrue. They also cite the chief of Border Patrol, who had “stated that Vice President Kamala Harris has not spoken with him since he was appointed in July 2023”; this simply proves the point that she was not, in fact, in charge of the border. On Thursday, in a party-line vote scheduled before the House adjourns for its August recess, Republicans passed the measure. It is purely symbolic.
While I concur that the resolution is “purely symbolic”, nearly all House resolutions are symbolic, so I’m not sure what point the author is making, save to reiterate the obvious.
In any event, there are so many “falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other inanities” in that paragraph that I need to break them up.
“Border Crossings”. The resolution’s sponsors didn’t actually “claim that border crossings in May 2024, were ‘higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump”, as the article contends. Rather, clauses 11 and 12 in H.Res. 1371 state:
Whereas, in May 2024, there were 170,723 illegal immigrant encounters at the United States southern border, a 185 percent increase from the average May encounter total under President Trump; [and]
Whereas May 2024 was the 39th straight month where monthly illegal immigrant encounters have been higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump . . … [Emphasis added.]
Both of those claims are dispositively true, as CBP’s own statistics reveal. The problem is that either the author of the article doesn’t know what an “encounter” is, or he elided some fairly salient facts.
By way of background, I must first note nearly all in the media (including the New Yorker) assess the rate of illegal migration by focusing solely on just one statistic, “Border Patrol apprehensions”.
An apprehension occurs when a Border Patrol agent arrests a migrant who has crossed the border illegally, between the ports.
Up until January 2023, the monthly number of apprehensions was the most useful metric to determine how many migrants were coming to the border illegally, even though that stat didn’t tell the whole story. That’s because by definition, apprehension totals exclude aliens who crossed illegally but weren’t caught (identified in statute as “got aways”).
Apprehensions, however, are just part of what DHS identifies as “encounters”, a term the department has been using since March 2020, when Title 42 first took effect.
In addition to apprehensions, “encounters” include aliens who were deemed inadmissible by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) component at the ports of entry.
In FY 2020, for example, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended 400,651 illegal entrants, while CBP officers in OFO stopped 57,437 other inadmissible aliens at the ports of entry there, for a total of 458,088 Southwest border encounters that fiscal year.
That OFO “inadmissible” figure has always been somewhat useful, for it showed how many aliens were trying to talk their way past CBP officers at the ports each month. Ports are meant for lawful travelers, and aliens without visas trying to exploit them have long been an issue to be addressed.
The concept that the ports are intended only for lawful travelers was turned on its head on January 5, 2023, when the White House issued a fact sheet titled “Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions”.
In a break from every prior administration, it announced that the Southwest border ports of entry would now be open to facially inadmissible aliens without visas or other admission documents, provided they scheduled port appointments using the CBP One app (what I refer to as the “CBP One app interview scheme”).
At present, 1,450 interview slots are available each day for inadmissible CBP One migrants, or roughly 43,500 per month.
The New Yorker goes to great pains to claim: “Border Patrol is on pace to arrest fewer than sixty thousand migrants in July, which would be the lowest number of monthly apprehensions since September, 2020”.
That may be true (final figures won’t be released until August), but it’s disingenuous to exclude the 43,500 CBP One migrants from that total, which would yield more than 100,000 July encounters.
The administration’s sole purpose in crafting the CBP One interview scheme is to artificially drive apprehension totals down – that is hide them from the public – by offering would-be illegal migrants an alternative to entering illegally between the ports: entering illegally through them.
As I’ve explained before, it’s no more “legal” for an alien to show up at a port of entry without proper admission documents than it is for the same alien to enter illegally between the ports of entry; in fact, section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) mandates that CBP treat those aliens exactly the same.
Nonetheless, the New Yorker refuses to admit those aliens are “illegal” because most are thereafter paroled into the United States. That’s a purely semantic exercise, not a legal one, and if my legal analysis doesn’t sway you, CBP’s statistics should.
CBP’s Statistics. Because those CBP One port aliens are inadmissible – regardless of whether they’re paroled – they count as “encounters”, which is the point the sponsors of H.Res. 1371 were making when they claimed accurately that there were 170,723 Southwest border encounters in May, as CBP records confirm.
Although, again, DHS didn’t start using the term encounter prior to March 2020, total encounters can be forensically tabulated back to FY 2014.
The monthly Southwest border encounter record over the four years of the Trump administration was set in May 2019, when Border Patrol made 132,856 apprehensions and CBP officers stopped 11,260 inadmissible aliens at the ports. The May monthly average of encounters at the Southwest border during the four years under Trump (FY 2017 to FY 2020) was just over 58,000.
The House resolution’s sponsors’ math, if anything, is a little too generous in favor of the Biden-Harris administration. By my calculations, the May 2024 total was 194 percent higher than the May average under Trump.
And needless to say, that May 2024 Southwest border encounter total was higher than during any month of the Trump administration.
Inanities. Having addressed the New Yorker’s contention that the factual allegations in the resolution were false, the question remains whether they were inane, too. The answer is no.
While the Border Patrol apprehension total remains relevant, cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and others haven’t been dealing with migrant crises of their own simply because of a spike in the number of migrants that Border Patrol has apprehended or even in the number encountered at the ports.
Instead, those cities are struggling to deal with their own migrant surges because of the unprecedented number of aliens who were stopped by CBP – both at the Southwest border ports and between them – and then released by DHS into the United States under Biden-Harris border policies.
Section 235(b) of the INA requires DHS to detain all aliens encountered by CBP at the border – both at the ports and between them. In the case of those port aliens, that mandate has applied since 1903.
Despite that detention requirement, congressional disclosures reveal that nearly 96 percent of aliens who schedule CBP One interviews are released into the United States on parole, while by my calculations more than 88.5 percent of all aliens encountered at the Southwest border in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration were released.
In FY 2023 alone, according to DHS statistics, Border Patrol agents released more than 909,000 illegal entrants they had apprehended at the Southwest border, while CBP officers at the ports there paroled more than 370,000 more – nearly 1.3 million new illegal arrivals cut loose into the country, free to head to New York or elsewhere.
Those releases, and the fiscal impacts they impose on cities and towns across the United States, are why the House sponsors highlighted those encounter numbers in the resolution. Hence the reason why clause 16 therein states: “the Biden border crisis is costing the United States approximately $150.7 billion each year and each taxpayer $1,156 each year”.
There is nothing inane about highlighting the massive costs Biden-Harris border release policies are imposing on taxpayers. Inanity would be not only ignoring but also failing to explain those costs, which the New Yorker does.
Harris Hasn’t Spoken to the Last Two Border Patrol Chiefs. The New Yorker also takes issue with two other clauses in the resolution, which state that VP Harris has never spoken to current Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, and that neither the VP nor President Biden ever spoke to Owens’ predecessor, Raul Ortiz.
The article contends “this simply proves the point that she [Harris] was not, in fact, in charge of the border” – even as it glowingly lauds her work dealing with the “root causes” of illegal migration.
That raises two questions: First, how would Harris know what those root causes were if she never talked to the Border Patrol chiefs, and apparently only had one perfunctory meeting with migrants in El Paso in June 2021?
The author of that piece contends: “The population coming to the border is now more global than it has ever been, the result of international conflicts, continued fallout from covid, political repression, and increasing immigration crackdowns in Europe.”
How does he know? I question whether he has spoken to many migrants, either, because if he had he likely would have learned that most are coming to live here and make money – and that the Biden-Harris border-release policies make that an economically advantageous bet.
Second, who exactly in the White House would have been in charge of the border if not Harris or Biden? Put differently, why would the “Biden-Harris Administration Announce[] New Border Enforcement Actions” in January 2023 if neither Biden nor Harris were involved in border enforcement?
“A Party-Line Vote”. The last contention in that article that I’ll address is the easiest to contest: the assertion that H.Res. 1371 passed “in a party-line vote”.
In actuality, six Democrats voted with 214 Republicans to pass that measure. The Democrats voting aye included Rep. Henry Cuellar (Tex.) who represents Texas 28, a border district just north of the Rio Grande Valley that includes Laredo.
Plainly he didn’t think the resolution “was replete with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other inanities” as the New Yorker contends, or he wouldn’t have crossed party lines to vote in favor of it. And he likely knows a whole lot more about the costs of this crisis than the author of this piece.
No Surprise – Just Shock. It’s no surprise that the New Yorker would provide cover for the border ineptitude of the Biden-Harris administration to support the presumptive Democratic candidate. That it made such sweeping but clearly erroneous and logically inconsistent pronouncements in doing so, however, is a bit of a shock.