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Last week, U.S. president Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office in the hopes of shoring up support for a massive military aid package for Ukraine and Israel.
An afterthought in this $105 billion proposal? An emergency appropriation in the amount of $13.6 billion to plug holes in America’s porous southern border – including the addition of 1,300 new border patrol agents and 1,600 new asylum officers.
Unaltered since December 30, 1853, the U.S.-Mexican border runs nearly 2,000 miles from San Diego, California on the Pacific Ocean to the mouth of the Rio Grande in the Gulf of Mexico. Divided into nine sectors, is the tenth longest land border on the planet – and is comprised of a mix of urban, suburban, river, mountain, desert and forest terrain.
As Biden was asking American taxpayers to foot the bill for additional military aid to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the situation on our nation’s southern border was deteriorating. According to the latest data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, the number of “southwest land encounters” surged to a record high of 269,735 during the month of September.
The border is in crisis – as this news outlet has documented extensively. Since February 2021 – Biden’s first full month as president – CBP has recorded a staggering 6.29 million border encounters (including a record 2.48 million encounters during the 2022 fiscal year).
Encounters under Biden have averaged 196,652 per month, according to the latest data. By contrast, there were a total of 458,088 encounters during former president Donald Trump’s final fiscal year in office – an average of 38,174 per month.
For those of you keeping score at home, that is a staggering 415 percent increase in monthly “encounters.”
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Worth recalling? These recorded encounters do not include the millions of “got-aways” – or illegal immigrants whose crossings are observed but who are never detained. The official number also fails to include the number of undetected illegal alien crossings at the border.
Trump has been hammering Biden on immigration. Just this week, he lamented the “millions of people that crooked Joe Biden has allowed into the United States through his ridiculous open borders policy.”
Upon his election in January 2021, Biden halted construction on Trump’s border wall, halted deportations and removed Covid-19-era restrictions on entry into the United States.
According to Trump, Biden’s policies have left America “more vulnerable (to) inside terror attacks than at any time in its history.”
Is he correct? Just this week, News Nation reported on a frightening memorandum that was reportedly circulated by the CBP office in San Diego alerting its agents to “the possibility of foreign fighters from the Middle East at America’s southern border.”
According to the memo, individuals “inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt to travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the (U.S.-Mexican) border.”
“Foreign fighters motivated by ideology or mercenary soldiers of fortune may attempt to obfuscate travel to or from the U.S. to or from countries in the Middle East through Mexico,” the memo noted.
Earlier this year, our media outlet published an extensive report detailing our trip to the Yuma sector of the U.S.-Mexican border in southwest Arizona. We also devoted an entire episode of our Week In Review program to the deteriorating situation at the border – documenting the worsening epidemic of drug and human trafficking into our country.
(Click to View)
Since then, we’ve shared stories about the human costs associated with the drug epidemic – which is being fueled by fentanyl trafficking in the Yuma sector, where 51 percent of the fentanyl in our country crosses over the border.
This is, quite simply, the biggest crisis facing our nation right now.
Biden’s border failure goes beyond national security, though. New regulations attached to the nation’s H-2A visa program are likely to impact food supplies – and food prices – as farmers find themselves unable to hire seasonal workers to harvest their crops.
Sam Peak – senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity – published a column last month in National Review addressing this aspect of the unfolding immigration catastrophe.
“Under Biden’s new rule, the H-2A program’s historically high wages are skyrocketing to unaffordable levels,” Peak wrote. “Farmers are now forced to miscategorize workers who briefly perform a task that falls under what the government deems a higher-earning occupation. If a sweet-potato farmer in North Carolina needs a harvester to spend an hour driving a truck to transport the potatoes to storage, Biden’s rule forces that farmer to categorize that worker as a truck driver and raise his pay by as much as 80 percent for the duration of his contract.”
“The sweet-potato farmer would lose more than $100,000 in a single season because the dozen potato-harvesters he hired have miraculously transformed into truckers,” Peak continued.
Who is going to bear the brunt of these costs? Consumers.
“Large farming operations will be inclined to keep marking up prices to stomach the new rule’s added costs,” Peak wrote. “Other farms, however, will likely scale down their businesses or close altogether.”
Either way, Biden’s legal immigration policies are going to drive up prices on food at a time when Americans can least afford it … all while he is rolling out the welcome mat to terrorists, drug dealers and other violent criminals at the southern border.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven (soon to be eight) children.
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3 comments
You summed it up in one observation: Biden’s border failure. It has been a disaster. His illegitimate presidency has been a disaster & no where is that more evident than at our southern border. I see people on here hammering President Trump constantly, but his policies were good for America. Love him or hate him, the true facts tell the story. Not the lies of the Left or MSM, but cold, hard truth.
Biden won the 2020 election in a landslide, while trump has been found guilty of rape and is facing multiple criminal trials where his coconspirators are flipping on him left and right.
There’s some cold, hard truth for you;-)
Ultimately the unchecked border with no one knows who is coming in and the uncontrolled debt/spending will be our demise.