Did Trump Close the Border?

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Friday, August 23, 2024

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn't she do the things
she's complaining about?
She didn't do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn't need a bill.
I didn't have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years.

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself.

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.

The Border Patrol endorsed it.

But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.

Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. Here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed. And I will sign it into law.

I think it should be noted, in the first place, that the bill in question, mostly written by Senator James Lankford (R-OK) and introduced in February, wasn't intended to "close the border" but to bring it under control, especially by hiring a lot of border patrol officers and legal personnel, including judges, to speed up the processing of the asylum claims so that the claimants can leave the border area, some of them getting deported and others getting approved on the spot instead of being sent to join families and friends to await their hearings, scheduled years away, as in the old system. It was kind of offensive to those of us who take a more "progressive" or "liberal" view on immigration, in its failure to engage on the more important issue of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who have been living here in many cases for decades, including the "dreamers" who have never lived anywhere else. Those are the ones Trump has promised to expel in the "mass deportations" that were such a hit in the Republican Convention in July, except he keeps saying there are 20 million or more.

It's nothing like the comprehensive approach we've been waiting for for 15 or 20 years. I don't love it, certainly, and wish Biden and Harris wouldn't act like it's a solution to all our problems. But it really would have alleviated the chaos at the Mexican border, and it's really disgusting that Trump was able to kill it by ordering Republican senators not to back it (poor Lankford himself had to vote against his own bill).

Trump is mistaken in believing that he ever "closed the border". During the years from 2017 to 2019 the number of encounters between Border Patrol officers and improper crossers shot up to levels that hadn't been seen since 2007, in spite of the cruel and legally dubious maneuvers of Trump's government to shut down the flow by separating families and parking people in concentration camps; what brought it down to numbers comparable to those of the Obama administration, in 2020, was the Covid-19 pandemic.

It's also the case, as the chart shows, that the encounters number went extremely high in the Biden administration, from 2021 to 2023, as rumors circulated around Central and South America that the new government would be friendlier to asylum seekers, and while Vice President Harris was successfully working with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to reduce the number of migrants from those countries, migrants surged from other countries—especially Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti—so it was essentially an entirely new problem, completely different from the "caravans" that started coming up through Guatemala in 2014-15.

The Lankford bill did have a provision for "closing the border" during emergencies, which would kick in automatically whenever there was a week of more than 5,000 crossings average per day. After Trump had it assassinated in April, Biden instituted something similar by executive order in June, but more importantly gave CBP authority to refuse to hear the asylum claim of anybody crossing the border other than at an official crossing. I originally thought this meant sending them back to Mexico to apply for an asylum hearing with the DHS phone app, but it seems they've been doing a huge amount of repatriations as well, which seems pretty harsh on people facing starvation in Venezuela or Haiti (or Sudan or Syria for that matter), and I don't like that either.

At the same time, the regularized method of applying from the home country and flying to the US is working spectacularly well: in June alone

about 494,799 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived lawfully on commercial flights and were granted parole under these processes. Specifically, 106,757 Cubans, 205,026 Haitians, 93,325 Nicaraguans, and 118,706 Venezuelans were vetted and authorized for travel; and 104,130 Cubans, 194,027 Haitians, 86,101 Nicaraguans, and 110,541 Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole.

Greg Abbott stopped sending busfuls of migrants to Democratic cities in June—I bet he'd have loved to have some arrive in Chicago for the convention this week, but there just aren't any. Biden effectively ended the border "crisis" two months ago, in spite of Trump's successful efforts to stop Congress, and there's still no indication Trump has any idea what he's talking about.