The Supreme Court ordered the Biden administration to reinstate President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which forced migrants to wait across the border while seeking asylum in the United States, on Aug. 24. After four months of purposeful delay, the administration says it will restart this desperately needed program this week. It’s a start, but not nearly enough.
The administration’s repeated attempts to get rid of Remain in Mexico and its other poor national-security decisions show it has no respect for law and order, the Supreme Court or the American citizens who are bearing the brunt of the chaos and cost it has created.
In just over nine months, Customs and Border Protection agents encountered a record-shattering 1.7 million migrants attempting to illegally cross our southern border. That’s roughly the same number of people as the populations of President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware and Vice President Kamala Harris’ home city of San Francisco combined.
This unprecedented surge in illegal crossings has created national-security, public-safety and drug-trafficking crises.
According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, 70 to 80 percent of fentanyl in the United States comes into our country over the southern California border. Counterfeit narcotics laced with fentanyl are mass-produced in Mexico, using chemicals from China, and are streaming over our open borders with help from drug cartels that prey on the vulnerable.
Sadly, our nation has hit the highest yearly numbers of opioid-related deaths ever recorded, and New York City is no stranger to this epidemic plaguing communities across the country. Biden’s disastrous handling of the border has turned every city into a border town.
This problem isn’t limited to the opioid crisis. In October alone, CBP arrested more than 680 individuals with criminal convictions and dozens of known gang members, including 23 members of MS-13 — and these are just the ones who’ve been caught.
Last month, a 24-year-old man who posed as an unaccompanied minor while illegally crossing our border brutally murdered the man who took him in. As a native New Yorker who was blocks away from Ground Zero on 9/11, I was shaken to my core by reports that Panama caught 52 al-Qaeda affiliates en route to America at its border.
Americans work hard, pay taxes and expect government to put them, not illegal immigrants, first. Instead of getting this crisis under control, the administration has stopped building the border wall that taxpayers continue to pay for month after month. It even reportedly plans to give $450,000 each to some of those who broke our laws by entering our country illegally. I’ve joined Sen. Tom Cotton in introducing legislation to stop these payments.
Biden is focused on adopting misguided incentives for illegal immigrants, such as the free college tuition and child care in the Democrats’ disastrous spending package being debated in Congress. This is a slap in the face to hardworking Americans and immigrants like my parents who followed the rules and never expected free handouts — they only wanted the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.
My first trip after being sworn in was to the southern border, where I met with CBP agents at migrant-processing facilities, rode alongside the Texas Department of Public Safety and saw firsthand how the drug cartels have overtaken our border with a multibillion-dollar drug- and human-trafficking enterprise. Biden and his “border czar” Harris can’t even be bothered to see the issue firsthand, let alone address it.
The ramifications of Biden’s border crisis are becoming more tragic by the day. What is it going to take for Democrats to protect American citizens?
I ask the Biden administration: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of the drug cartels? Or are you on the side of the American people?
Republican Nicole Malliotakis represents Staten Island and southern Brooklyn in Congress.