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Aug. 11, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
25:09
Yes, Illegal Immigration Is Spiking Thanks To Joe Biden | Ep. 1554
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We examine Joe Biden's history on illegal immigration and how he morphed from a border hawk to an open border president.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the Secretary of Homeland Security continues to maintain that our southern border is secure.
This is obviously not true.
Hundreds of thousands of people are crossing our southern border every single month.
The vast majority of them will end up basically being released into the United States after a certain period of time.
Because when they come to the border, then we give them a piece of paper that says that you have to have your asylum claim adjudicated, at which point they are released into the interior.
Some come back for their first appointment.
Many never come back for their second appointment.
Hundreds of thousands of people every month, and that's not including people who just entered the border and were caught by Border Patrol in the first place.
The Biden administration continues to claim through gritted teeth that everything is fine at the border.
Everyone knows things are not fine at the border, and this has very serious consequences for the United States, not only in terms of our fiscal future, in terms of crime, in terms of electoral demographics, because eventually, you imagine, Democrats will attempt to amnesty a lot of these people who have violated the law.
Now, as I've always said, I don't blame people for attempting to get into the United States.
This is the greatest country on the face of the planet.
Why wouldn't you try to get in if you could?
The real question is whether the United States is a sovereign country that controls its own border.
The Democrats apparently have decided they no longer wish for the United States to be a sovereign country that controls its own border.
Because to understand where Joe Biden is on this issue, you have to understand where Joe Biden has been.
Joe Biden, as always, is a bellwether inside the Democratic Party.
He's just a weathervane.
He does not have opinions of his own.
The opinions he does have of his own tend to be very, very wrong, but he just follows the base of the Democratic Party wherever it leads, which is why during the Democratic primaries in 2020, he was slightly more moderate than Bernie Sanders, but then he immediately swiveled and became more left-wing the minute that he gained power, because the Democratic base wanted him to be more left-wing.
Joe Biden is not a sentient being on his own.
He is animated by the desires of the of the median voter inside the Democratic Party.
And this is why, if you look at his evolution on illegal immigration, it's extraordinarily clear how the Democratic Party has morphed.
So, for example, in 1996, Joe Biden is one of the biggest backers of a bill that is now remembered by Democrats as something horrible, right? It's sort of like Joe Biden on crime. In 1994, Joe Biden supported this crime bill, which was extraordinarily effective in lowering crime across the United States. Then by 2020, he had to run against the crime bill because the Democratic Party had decided that police were bad. Well, same thing happened with illegal immigration. In 1996, according to Vox.com, not a right-wing source, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that overhauled
immigration enforcement in the United States and laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today.
The 1996 immigration bill continues to control a lot of our immigration law.
It was supported by Joe Biden.
So this particular bill handled how Border Patrol was supposed to deal with this.
The immigration law was called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, pronounced IRA-IRA.
And some of the most significant portions of the law is that it made more people eligible for deportation.
If you were convicted of certain crimes, you are eligible for deportation.
But in 1996, Congress expanded the crimes, which made an immigrant eligible for deportation, and they made those changes retroactive.
It got easier to deport people.
Immigrants who were convicted of crimes weren't the only ones stripped of the ability to argue their case before a judge, before getting deported.
Anybody apprehended within 100 miles of the border could be sent before a judge.
And IRA required the government to hold more immigrants in detention before deporting them, making it harder for them to get lawyers in the first place.
It also made it a lot harder for unauthorized immigrants to get legal.
Before 1996, immigrants who had been in the United States for at least 7 years could get legal status as long as they showed it would cause them extreme hardship to get deported.
IRA-IRA made it a lot harder.
It limited cancellation of removal to immigrants who had been in the United States for at least 10 years.
Instead of having to show that the immigrant would suffer extreme hardship if deported, The immigrant would now have to show that a U.S.
citizen would suffer exceptional and extremely unusual hardship, which sounds more like DACA, right?
And the U.S.
can only grant this to 3,000 immigrants per year.
So this led to a massive spike in deportations.
You can see it in the stats.
The number of Mexicans deported from the United States rose from somewhere around 25,000 in 1994-1995 to 150,000 by 1998-1999 because of this particular law.
This was supported by Joe Biden, who, as I say, used to be a border hawk.
The simple fact that Joe Biden used to be a border hawk is, again, indicative of how far left the Democratic Party overall has moved.
And he stayed a border hawk all the way up until about 2006.
In 2006, here's Joe Biden explaining that it was important.
He did a full immigration speech in which Joe Biden said, we needed to tighten the border with fences.
There must be fences.
Not Donald Trump, Joe Biden.
2006, not all that long ago.
And talked about illegal drugs flowing from the erstwhile democracy of Mexico.
This sounds a lot like Donald Trump circa 2016.
The country that is the erstwhile democracy where they have the greatest disparity in wealth.
It's one of the wealthiest countries In the hemisphere, I voted for offense.
I voted, unlike most Democrats, for something you won't like.
I voted for 700 miles, sentence.
People are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts from methamphetamines to cocaine to heroin.
It's all coming up through corrupt Mexico.
Who does that sound like right there?
Joe Biden, Circuit 2006.
I'm for building 700 miles of fence.
There are tons of the prerequisites for meth coming up through that Mexican border, through the corrupt Mexican government.
They're not sending their best.
Who does that sound like?
That was Joe Biden circa 2006, because the Democrats didn't used to be this radical on illegal immigration.
In fact, in 2007, Joe Biden, who was then running for president, said, let's send the employers of illegal immigrants to prison.
If you employ an illegal immigrant, you should go to jail, says Joe Biden.
Again, sounds pretty hawkish on immigration.
If in fact, the person who should send to jail is not the illegal, he should send to jail the employer.
If you knowingly hire, knowingly hire an illegal area, then you should be held accountable.
Again, sounds pretty hawkish on immigration.
In fact, in 2008, a year later, he said he opposed giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants.
Undocumented people in this country, should they be able to get drivers licenses?
places. You give Senator Biden.
Thank you.
No.
No.
Okay, so that was Joe Biden up until about 2008.
Then he became the vice presidential candidate under Barack Obama, and he immediately swiveled.
So for the first couple of years, Barack Obama didn't seem too loose on the border then.
In 2012, you started to see a major upswing in illegal immigration brought on by the fact that Joe Biden and Barack Obama decided that if you were a dreamer, meaning you were somebody who was brought here as a minor, then you would not be deported.
There would be deferred action for childhood arrivals.
And in fact, the entire Obama administration, which is a very radical administration, was predicated on the idea that there should not be deportations of illegal immigrants.
Remember, in 2012, Barack Obama ran on the notion that Mitt Romney was too harsh on immigration.
Because Mitt Romney's proposal was that a lot of people would quote-unquote self-support if you didn't give them benefits.
So by 2015, Joe Biden and Barack Obama were meeting with DREAMers.
And suddenly, Barack Obama and Joe Bi- again, because Barack Obama was the center of the Democratic Party, he was the lodestar around which the Democratic Party moved, Joe Biden swiveled from border hawk to border dove.
Here is Joe Biden hanging out with Barack Obama in 2015 with the DREAMers.
My parents, they have two small businesses in Southern California.
They have dry cleaners.
We're very involved with our community.
We're very involved with our church.
My mom is actually the vice president of the Women's Club at our park.
All we want to have is an opportunity to fully give back to this country.
You guys remind us why not only this issue is so important, but you remind me of What's best about this country and why we need to fight for values that make this a special place.
And Joe Biden sitting there nodding along to something that presumably he would have disagreed with about 10 years before.
Well, that is typical Joe Biden.
It's also important to recognize here why Obama did this in 2012.
It was June 2012 when Obama announced DACA.
The reason he did it is because he was trying to cobble together the intersectional coalition and he was trying to hand out goodies to as many intersectional groups as he thought he could identify.
Now, it turns out Hispanics are not able to be pandered to this way.
The notion that Hispanics are widely in favor of illegal immigration is just not true.
By polling data, Hispanics don't particularly like illegal immigration.
But the Joe Biden who represents the center of the Democratic Party continues to move to the left.
By the time you hit 2018, he's ripping Donald Trump's border policy as one of the darkest moments in American history.
One of the worst things happening in America, right?
This is the kids in cages era of American political media.
Remember that because of a consent decree that was undertaken during the Obama era, You could no longer hold parents and children together in detention.
And so what this meant is that you had to separate the parents from the kids and you had to keep the kids in certain facilities if you couldn't give them to family members and all the rest of this.
Under Obama, right?
Under the Florida settlement.
And suddenly this became Donald Trump's fault because he said, I'm not just going to release the parents with the kids into the interior of the United States.
Here was Joe Biden, who used to say, we need a 700 mile fence.
We need to arrest employers who hire illegal immigrants.
There's drugs flowing up through the border.
Now saying that it's one of the worst things in human history that Donald Trump is harsh on the border.
This administration's policy that literally ripped babies from the arms of their mothers and fathers is one of the darkest moments in our history.
Our reputation is being tarnished around the world.
Not only is it a national shame, it tarnishes the very idea of America.
It tarnishes the idea of America, by the way.
I should note at this point, that was 2018.
July 17th, 2022, as of that date, there were 443 kids without parents who came across the border.
There were over 11,600 children who were being held by the feds.
The United States was expecting up to 161,000 single minors to cross the border in 2022.
In 2014, which was a major immigration crisis in the United States, that number was 68,000.
Today, it's almost triple that under Joe Biden.
So, important to recognize Joe Biden's massive evolution on this issue.
And so, all of the policies that he has undertaken are geared toward broader illegal immigration now.
Because the Democratic Party has basically decided that the border must never be enforced for political reasons.
Because ideologically speaking, borders are bad.
Ideologically speaking, borders are exclusive.
Ideologically speaking, everyone who wants to get in should be able to get in.
Particularly, particularly, if a lot of those people tend to hold the same sort of I mean, why not?
I'm searching for another explanation as to why they're so soft on the border.
Can you give me one?
Democrats cannot.
Instead, they just lie to you.
They say the border is safe, everything is fine.
But they know that it's not.
So, what is the political reason for doing this other than there must be some sort of political or ideological gain?
So, to push forward, on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration, the administration released a proposed bill That would include a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people and a series of executive actions, among them an immediate stop to construction of fencing along the southern border.
Big transition from 2006 Joe Biden, I support fencing on the southern border to stop the construction that's already underway on the border because it's got a big T on it for Trump.
According to the LA Times, the incoming administration described its package as a common sense approach to modernizing and restoring humanity to the immigration system after four years of President Trump's systematic crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration.
The U.S.
Citizenship Act, which Biden sent to Capitol Hill on Inauguration Day, offered an eight-year roadmap to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States without legal status.
Now, the big problem, of course, is that he didn't secure the border before pushing any of this.
So, if you push a giant amnesty, and at the same time you say, we're not going to close the border, what do you think?
That's a free donut sign in a shop window.
If approved, it would prioritize three categories of people to immediately receive green cards.
Farm workers, people with temporary protected status, and DACA, DREAMers.
In Washington, California and other states with vast immigrant labor populations, the new bill could dramatically increase job security and significantly raise living standards, according to the LA Times.
So, again, this was pushed immediately by Joe Biden, like, first day that he entered office.
We'll get to more of Joe Biden's terrible border policy in just one second.
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So Joe Biden has pursued just a slate, a bevy of terrible policies on immigration.
According to the New York Post, this is circa February 2021, the Biden administration has revived the so-called catch-and-release system when it comes to illegal immigrants at the southern border.
President Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order revoking former President Trump's ending of a controversial practice which allows undocumented migrants to remain in the U.S.
while awaiting immigration proceedings.
Customs and Border Protection said the shift in policy was the result of three issues, the influx of migrants and children, Mexico's refusal to take in families with kids under 12, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The executive order Only permits Border Patrol to hold an undocumented illegal alien crossing the border up to 72 hours.
So, right away he went back to catch and release.
According to CBP Public Affairs Officer Rod Keyes, CBP has seen a steady increase in border encounters since April 2020, which, aggravated by COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing guidelines, has caused some facilities to reach maximum safe holding capacity.
It's already in February.
It'll get a lot worse.
Per longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions aren't possible, some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a notice to appear, and released into the U.S.
So catch and release was immediately put back in place by Joe Biden, like right away upon taking office.
And unsurprisingly, the border crisis began to mount.
By August of 2021, CBP had stopped more than 210,000 migrants in July of 2021.
That was the biggest monthly number in more than 20 years.
Already, by halfway through the year, more than 1.3 million migrants had been captured at the border, twice the population of the city of Boston, according to Con Carroll over at the Washington Examiner.
CBP agents were releasing migrants in the United States without testing them for COVID.
They were swamping border communities.
They were being busted throughout the United States.
Again, all of this was promoted by the Biden administration.
In fall of 2013, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso noticed the number of unaccompanied kids apprehended while crossing the southern border had doubled over the previous three years.
The researchers visited CBP facilities across the Southwest.
They interviewed officials who worked with migrant children.
What the researchers found alarmed them.
They warned DHS officials if policies did not change, the number of migrants apprehended at the border was likely to double, leaving CBP without the capacity to house and process them.
The federal government ignored the report.
So what did researchers find that led them to predict the 2014 border crisis?
Apparently, it was just border policy.
In 2014, both Border Patrol and ICE officers agreed the lack of deterrence for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border had impacted the rate at which they were apprehending unaccompanied children.
In other words, migrants learned that if they got caught by U.S.
officials at the southern border, they wouldn't be punished, and U.S.
officials would help them complete their journey.
And so, this has been exacerbated under Joe Biden.
Biden campaigned on a promise to open the country's borders.
Asked by Univision's Jorge Ramos, why should Latinos trust you?
Biden said during the campaign, quote, if you want to flee and you are fleeing oppression, you should come.
So everybody who's coming is now claiming asylum, of course.
The predictable result is a mass migration crisis.
And to add insult to injury, Joe Biden has then condemned officers attempting to prevent vast illegal immigration into the United States.
When border patrol officers tried to stop Haitian immigrants, a huge number of people who are crossing the border are not coming from Mexico, by the way.
When Joe Biden saw CBP officers trying to stop people from crossing the Rio Grande or running away into the Rio Grande and manipulating their horses with the reins, the media proclaimed that they were whipping migrants.
Joe Biden immediately came out and condemned the CBP officers.
It was horrible what to see, as you saw.
To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over, people being strapped.
It's outrageous.
I promise you those people will pay.
There will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences.
There will be consequences.
It's an embarrassment, but it's beyond an embarrassment.
It's dangerous.
It's wrong.
It sends the wrong message around the world.
It sends the wrong message at home.
It's simply not who we are.
Unbelievable.
Okay, and all of it was a lie.
The Border Patrol agents weren't whipping the migrants at all.
That didn't stop Biden from ripping the Border Patrol agents.
Then you wonder why there's vast illegal immigration happening right now?
Joe Biden has attempted to backfill that by keeping in place Title 42.
Title 42 is, of course, a Trump-era policy that basically says that we can reject people at the border thanks to COVID-19.
Biden, on the one hand, has been trying to please his base by saying he's going to get rid of Title 42.
On the other hand, he knows the minute he gets rid of Title 42, hundreds of thousands more illegal immigrants are going to come into the United States.
But the Biden administration policy is not changing.
It's getting worse and it's getting worse.
Andrew Arthur over at the Center for Immigration Studies points out a vast bevy of serious problems at the border.
He says the Biden administration has a transparency problem when it comes to immigration.
USCIS has just released a document showing what happens at the border.
It shows the administration is not using expedited removal, a key tool designed explicitly to allow DHS to control illegal entries to address the calamity unfolding at the southern border.
Apparently, they're just deciding not to expedite the removals.
Instead, they're releasing people into the interior of the United States.
Despite the popular characterization of all migrants who enter illegally at the southwest border and are released into the United States as asylum seekers, most are not, at least not at the time they were released.
Few illegal immigrants who are placed into removal proceedings will have any other form of immigration relief.
Most eventually will file asylum applications as a fallback.
And so everybody's now filing asylum, and then they're being released into the interior of the United States.
Even Joe Biden's own Secretary of Homeland Security is admitting that 1.4 million illegal immigrants have been processed at the border since January of 2021.
That's an insane number.
According to the U.S.
District Court, which you submitted, the DHS has directly released at least 836,000 aliens into the United States since January 21st.
Then you add the 207,000 unaccompanied alien children, UACs, and then your Border Patrol estimates somewhere from 200,000 to 400,000 gotaways.
In other words, encounters that are not evaded apprehension.
And gotaways have been a challenge?
From the beginning.
That matches your numbers roughly?
I believe so.
Those are huge numbers.
He's admitting to hundreds of thousands of gotaways.
1.4 million people who have been processed at the border.
And by the way, look at the chart, okay?
This is not just a generalized immigration problem.
These are the migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border.
They reached their highest level ever in 2021.
Look at that massive spike.
Look at that ginormous spike.
So you saw a bit of an uptick in 2014.
You can see it on the chart.
And then, you can see that by, say, 2016, you have about 303,000 migrants encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border.
1.659 million migrants encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, fiscal year 2021.
That's insane!
And yet, apparently it's okay with Joe Biden.
A huge number, by the way, of those encounters involve people from countries other than Mexico, which shows that it's not just an immediate border problem.
It's that everybody now realizes the border is wide open.
The encounters are soaring in fiscal year 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Pew Research.
That includes Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba.
Migrant encounters increased across demographic groups in fiscal 2021.
Single adults continue to be the large majority.
So this is people who are coming here to set down anchors.
They're not bringing their families.
There are 144,000 unaccompanied children who arrived at the border in 2021.
144,000.
That number, by the way, in 2013 was 38,000.
That's a massive spike under Joe Biden.
That number, by the way, in 2013 was 38,000.
That's a massive spike under Joe Biden.
They've been doubling in all nine Southwest border sectors by 2021.
So, you know, all of this is to suggest that Joe Biden's policies have predictable effects.
Also, border deaths have surged.
According to the Daily Signal, under the Biden administration, deaths of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 increased by almost 300 from the prior year, and by 200 from the last non-pandemic year.
According to the U.N., more border deaths have occurred in the first half of 2022 than for the entire calendar years of 2020, 2018, and 2017.
2020, 2018, and 2017.
So people continue to continue, they try to cross and then they die.
Meanwhile, fentanyl seizures have risen dramatically.
We'll see you next time.
In June of 2021, NBC News reported that they had seen a staggering 4,000% increase in El Paso, that sector of the border, in fentanyl seizures over the past three years.
The busts are not at ports of entry where most smuggled drugs are typically found.
They say that the rising amount of fentanyl is being found in the desert, transported by increasingly brazen smugglers who are exploiting stretched federal resources.
A migrant crisis allows other people to sneak through.
And as you can see, by the way, the stats are just extraordinary.
The amount of fentanyl seized at the southern border has hit all-time highs under Joe Biden.
Massive numbers.
Well over 1,200 pounds of fentanyl seized at the southwest U.S.
border in April 2022.
According to factcheck.org, again, a left-wing source, Overall, about 13,021 pounds of fentanyl were seized in Joe Biden's first full 15 months in office, 70% more than the 7,677 pounds of fentanyl seized in Trump's last 15 months as president.
That is a massive increase.
And none of this is a particular shock.
The CBP is struggling, trying to hold the border.
They don't have the manpower.
They don't have the backing from the administration.
So when this administration says the border is secure and Joe Biden is handling it, he is not.
And you know why he's not handling?
Because he doesn't want to handle it.
It is that simple.
So when you hear Joe Biden and teams suggest that illegal immigration is just an unhandleable problem or it's the Northern Triangle, no, it is your border policy, sir.
And that has exacerbated an already underlying crisis on our southern border.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
We'll be back here with much, much more tomorrow.
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