Letter to America: Prepare for the Next Human Tidal Wave of the Biden Border Crisis

A modified version of this was published April 18 in The New York Post

By Todd Bensman

AUSTIN, Texas — The real, true, and final end of a pandemic-era measure “Title 42,” which allowed for the quick expulsions of all illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, is nigh. Set to end on May 11, the title was a potent deterrent when President Trump applied it to almost 90 percent of all illegally crossing immigrants and, far less so at 35 percent after President Biden got his hands on it.

I predict that big trouble is on the way to the southern border, from which I’ve just returned. In Juarez, thousands of immigrants are living in abandoned buildings, sleeping on the streets, and many hundreds more a day show up on freight trains.

A human onslaught is now building all over Mexico and farther south. It seems far likelier than not that it will wash over America after May 11, the result of the Biden administration’s Title 42 replacement plan. Publicly, the Democrats have been billing it as slap-jaw Trumpian tough on illegal immigration.

But it is instead the polar opposite, the whole plan a concentrated enticement of irresistible, siren-song power.

I dearly hope to be proven wrong. But for reasons I’ll explain shortly, America should expect a broken-dam flooding torrent of foreign families with children crossing over the border and turning themselves in for Border Patrol agents to process them into American communities by the many hundreds of thousands. America should expect a Hurricane Katrina of minors without parents pouring over. America should expect a tsunami of single adults.

And while every federal agent on deck is busy processing all of these into their country, Americans should expect a high tide of criminal aliens who will run, dodge and escape through a perimeter left unguarded into the U.S. interior as “got-aways,” to enjoy the Biden administration’s near-moratorium on every kind of deportation, as I have revealed in my new book about this historic mass migration, Overrun.

Why such a new storm approacheth

The administration has laced its whole plan with almost narcotic enticement for which far more foreign nationals will cross the land border than the Department of Homeland Security can possibly manage.

Here’s why.

When Title 42 was in place, Trump and Biden, the latter a far lesser degree, could wield it like a cattle prod to both quickly expel border-jumpers back into Mexico or beyond and — critically — to deny them access to the U.S. asylum system. Cutting off access to this system was a serious deterrent; immigrants stayed home when Trump held Title 42 but came in historic droves when Biden opened a wide aperture of exemptions from it.

The new Biden plan’s replacement cattle prod that will prove entirely useless. This one is the same one always provided by the Immigration and Naturalization Act, known as “Title 8 expedited removal.”

Biden’s top people talk really tough about how they are going to use the Title 8 prod without mercy to force back the storm. The first tell-tail clue that this is pure hokum is that, in all their public pronouncements and regulations, administration officials vow that every immigrant who crosses that border — by god — will darned well be full-on “subject” to Title 8’s expedited removal provision.

Of course, everyone getting the “subjected to” treatment is a universe from being expeditiously removed.

Still, Biden’s people always say it this way, universally, because they know full well their proposed regulation published on February 21 offers a sumptuous host of sure-fire dodges that all but guarantee escape from expedited removal and admission into America. It is, of course, all the rewarding admissions that power ever greater volumes to come because those admitted upstream send selfies on social media that say come one, come all — and come right now before those dumb Americans figure out what they’ve done to themselves.

The many artful dodges

The first of these baked-in-cake dodges is that any immigrant who merely declares an intent to claim asylum on grounds that they were persecuted at home pushes off Title 8 removal proceedings and gets into a separate end-run asylum claim line. Bolstered teams of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service asylum officers will be on remote deck to quickly screen claims by Zoom meeting while the immigrants are supposedly held in detention.

Tough talk for retail political consumption has it that Biden’s government will presume that no immigrant is eligible for asylum and quickly deport them.

No one should buy this hogwash.

First, this “presumed ineligibility” is not going to apply to minors who jump the border without parents or guardians, the new policy explicitly specifies.

Therefore, expect the unmitigated flood of unaccompanied minors that began with Biden exempted this group from Title 42 expulsions on Day One — an historic 350,000–400,000 just since inauguration — to ramp up to the highest Earth orbit yet.

Next, the administration’s proposed regulation slips in the idea that its ineligibility presumption is a “rebuttable” one. And the authors made damned sure it was.

All anyone must do to achieve this dodge is claim they face “an extreme and imminent threat to their life or safety, such as imminent threat of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder,” the regulation discloses. That’ll get most of them released into America to add their asylum case to the nearly five-year backlog of them so they can disappear years from now when they lose — or just disappear now after their release at the border. Whichever is beside the point.

And if an asylum officer turns them down even after they say they fear imminent harm if returned to Mexico? No problemo.

They can appeal til the cows come home in front of immigration judges and courts of appeal and, since all of that legal work always takes a long time, they’ll get released into America too. After all, the administration has assured that human rights lawyers will be present at all of these screenings

Foreign national families will pile drive into the American interior under a different dodge around Title 8 expedited removal. A 2015 amended court settlement called “the Flores Settlement” requires that the U.S. government release young children and their parents from detention within 21 days while they all rebut and appeal their asylum screening declines.

President Trump came close to abolishing the narcotic global enticement that is the Flores Settlement, but Biden kept it. Flores’s quick-release properties are already so well-known throughout the world — and so wildly cherished — America should expect literally millions of new immigrants who enter as families to start pouring into its cities after May 11, right alongside the enhanced crush of solo-traveling minors and single adults who will learn from their lawyer advocates what to say and how to rebut.

This new plan envisions deporting only the dumbest and most ignorant of immigrants under Title 8, those who for whatever reason “do not rebut the presumption, and do not establish a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country of removal.”

The bottom line is that an America that has suffered record-smashing border crossings of 4.8 million foreign nationals since President Biden opened vast Title 42 exemptions starting on Inauguration Day 2021 deserve to know the administration is feeding them something inedible by the shovel-full.

Hoping dearly that I am wrong about all of this, Americans should know what the ingredients are really in this next batch of Biden border crisis and prepare an antidote for after Title 42 ends next month.