America has been rocked in recent weeks with stories about crimes committed by illegal aliens. Most recently, the chaotic destabilization in Haiti has raised questions about the likelihood of criminal actors exploiting the current administration’s wide-open border policies to come in and import the violence. Law enforcement officials in Florida just this week reportedly interdicted a vessel with some 25 suspected illegal aliens from Haiti aboard. According to Gov. Ron DeSantis, they were armed with guns, drugs, and night-vision equipment.
This stark reality is compounded by the Center for Immigration Studies’ recent revelation that the Biden administration flew some 320,000 inadmissible aliens into American airports last year via the CBP One app — though it won’t say where. One of the illegal aliens who entered the country under some such “federal program” from Haiti was recently charged with raping a 15-year-old girl with disabilities in Boston.
If only the problem of illegal alien crime were tied just to the situation in Haiti. Instead, America has been dealing with such crimes as the aftermath of this president’s border invasion for years now.
Weeks ago, we heard of the horrific death of 22-year-old Laken Riley in Georgia. We later learned that her alleged killer is a Venezuelan national who was released into the United States under Biden’s mass parole policies. In July 2022, Kayla Hamilton — a 20-year-old woman with autism — was brutally raped and strangled to death, leading to the arrest of an MS-13 gang member from El Salvador who was released into the country by the Biden administration.
Earlier this month, a minor-aged girl in Louisiana was allegedly raped by an illegal immigrant from Honduras who was released into the country by the Biden administration in 2023. Reports say he’s been “arrested on charges of armed robbery, aggravated battery, first-degree rape and aggravated assault.” Last November, a married couple from Georgia was struck and killed in a high-speed collision by a suspected human smuggler in Texas. Venezuelan gangs are running wild in New York City.
Every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is, by definition, preventable. It is not rocket science; they simply aren’t supposed to be here. And not only are the crimes themselves bad by their nature, but they make things even worse by taking resources away from police officers who need to be dealing with the criminals who are already here organically.
The Biden administration has no excuse for what’s happening. All they can do is hide behind shamefully dismissive, boilerplate comments from the White House press secretary and try to point the finger anywhere but at the deliberate policy decisions that led to this. Meanwhile, the president’s political allies are all too happy to play the race card as a distraction.
In reality, the president and his handlers have taken scores of actions — starting on his first day in office — to destabilize operational control, open the border, hamstring career federal law enforcement, and make American citizens less safe as a result.
Those policies have created complete chaos. Border Patrol agents have been overwhelmed and demoralized in ways the service has never seen before. Meanwhile, migrants from all over the world are showing up, claiming asylum, and being paroled into the country en masse. Regardless of how many criminals or suspected terrorists might get caught in the process at the ports of entry, we have to deal with the fact that there have been at least 1.8 million known gotaways throughout Biden’s tenure. It stands to reason many of those people are the worst of the worst, since they evade Border Patrol even when the president’s welcome mat is rolled out.
Our communities and law enforcement officers can’t wait another year for a new presidential administration. Law-abiding citizens and legal immigrants who did the right thing don’t deserve the chaos that’s been invited into our cities, towns, and neighborhoods. And career law enforcers, already demoralized by Democrats’ anti-police sentiment, don’t deserve even more danger on the job from people who shouldn’t have been released into this country in the first place.
The solution isn’t complicated. Congress should pass legislation that will give the president and Homeland Security secretary no choice but to enforce the law and secure the border. Some of the president’s opponents have fallen back on the talking point that Biden could fix this tomorrow if he wanted to use the power at his disposal. He clearly does not want to and has chosen otherwise for over three years now. He needs to be forced to uphold federal laws as the previous president did — either by a bill such as H.R. 2 or by Congress withholding funding for executive branch priorities to force policy changes.
In the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson made clear what the focus of the American government was supposed to be: to secure our God-given, inalienable rights and to look after the safety and happiness of our fellow citizens. While the founders knew government should be limited, they also knew that one of its key, proper functions was to enforce laws and protect law-abiding people from lawbreakers.
Right now, however, our federal government is failing at that job and making it harder for state and local governments by keeping our border wide open.
This isn’t just a border crisis. Recent events make clear it is a crime crisis and always has been, and it has to stop. The politicians who campaigned on law and order need to act like it, and they need to act like it soon.
