President Joe Biden will visit the southern border on Sunday for the first time as president, turning his attention to immigration after presiding over spiraling rates of illegal crossings.
Summary
President Joe Biden will visit the southern border on Sunday for the first time as president as the flow of illegal migrants has spiraled on his watch. Annual numbers of illegal crossings topped two million in 2022, more than twice the highest level seen during the Trump administration.
- Biden’s visit comes on the eve of the “three amigos” summit of North American leaders kicking off Monday in Mexico City.
- Immigration and trade issues are expected to dominate the trilateral meeting between Biden, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
- In the days leading up to the trip, Biden announced the U.S. would begin turning away illegal migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua on top of an existing effort to deter illegal immigration from Venezuela. Along with this move, the U.S. will begin accepting 30,000 people per month from those four nations with legal work visas for two years.
- Biden’s new policies have drawn criticism from Republicans for failing to address the soaring rates of illegal immigration and from Democrats who believe the policies are too harsh, regardless of the humanitarian toll imposed on border towns and on the migrants themselves.
- Mexico arrested one of the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in a Thursday morning raid that set off gunfights and violence throughout Sinaloa. Ovidio Guzmán is under federal indictment for conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana in the United States.
- Democrats and self-described “human rights activists” have attacked Biden’s new immigration measures as a “humanitarian disgrace,” according to The New York Times. Whether they consider the dozens of migrants who died attempting to illegally cross the southern border, egged on by lax immigration enforcement, to be a similar “humanitarian disgrace” is unclear.
- CNN observed that immigration has become a “political liability for the administration” after two years when the Biden team clearly did not make border enforcement a key policy priority.
- The Washington Post believes that because Biden, Harris, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have immigration stories, the U.S. must accept all immigrants. Really. “President Biden’s Irish ancestors escaped the Famine on coffin ships. Vice President Harris’s parents were scholars from India and Jamaica. And Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to the United States as a baby when his family fled Cuba. All three leaders stood before television cameras in Washington this week to announce that some migrants would get new opportunities to pursue similar dreams in the United States and that others would face swift removal to border cities in Mexico. It was a deflating and lonely moment.
- Fox News compiled the criticism Biden received from three prominent conservatives after comparing asylum-seekers to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Fox quoted commentator Mark Levin and two tweets from members of Congress who disagreed with his comparison.
- Cracking down on the flow of fentanyl into the United States and guns into Mexico are also expected to be some of the key issues discussed at the “three amigos” summit, according to the Washington Examiner.
- National Review’s Andy McCarthy blasted the Biden administration’s immigration “parole” plan as a “scam” and “theater” to make it look like Biden is taking the flow of illegal migration seriously without actually cracking down and stopping illegal immigration.
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
