Editors at the Washington Examiner critique recent statements from members of the previous presidential administration.
The Democratic Party wants voters to believe the border crisis created by President Joe Biden was an accident that Democrats solved in June 2024 with an executive order tightening asylum screening.
This is utterly false. The Biden administration worked hard with the United Nations to facilitate as much migration to the United States as possible. The U.N. reaffirmed the policy this week, and it is therefore only one White House election away from being reinstated by a future Democratic administration.
Biden’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was asked at a security summit this week whether President Donald Trump would have won the 2024 election if Biden had acted sooner to close the border.
“I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took executive action that, I thought, made reforms that were sensible and proved successful,” Mayorkas responded. “Our tougher border stance was coupled with an increased focus on providing lawful pathways for people to arrive in the United States outside the hands of smugglers. Those two combined dropped our numbers by 70%-75%.”
This is a fabrication. In June 2024, the month the executive action was announced, 130,415 migrants were intercepted crossing the southern border. By December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office, apprehensions had fallen to 96,000. That is a decline, but of only 25%, not the 75% Mayorkas claims.
Southern border apprehensions peaked in December 2023 at 301,981, and fell to 96,000 by December 2024, a 70% decline. But unless Mayorkas is also claiming to have invented time travel, he cannot use a June 2024 executive order to take credit for a decline in border apprehensions that began six months earlier.
The reality is that the Biden administration, and most particularly Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, reached a secret deal with Mexico in December 2023 under which they agreed not to announce their immigration executive order until after Mexico’s June 2024 election.
