Biden’s Immigration Legacy Is ‘Historic’ … For All The Wrong Reasons

President Joe Biden is leaving office with several 🛂Immigration-related milestones under his belt, including the lowest number of deportations in a single year, the highest number of border encounters in another and record fentanyl seizures.

The Biden administration, eager to conduct an about-face from the previous White House’s hardline policy against 🛂Immigration violations, got to work on a flurry of executive orders that transformed enforcement operations. While the Democratic president mostly succeeded in cutting back enforcement in the early days of his administration, he eventually was left scrambling to reverse course after igniting a border crisis that led to the largest influx of foreign nationals in the country’s history.

Roughly 11 million border encounters took place from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, until December 2024, his last full month, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. Amid the ongoing border crisis that began under his watch, fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024 became the worst in U.S. history, respectively, for inadmissible border encounters.

“A catastrophe,” Eric Ruark, research director for NumbersUSA, a Washington, D.C.,-based 🛂Immigration organization, said to the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation when asked to give a summation of Biden’s border legacy. “‘Historic’ is another term I’d use.”

While many migrants were turned away or later deported, a great many asylum seekers were permitted to enter and remain in the country.

An analysis by The New York Times found that Biden oversaw the greatest net migration in history, even surpassing the major migration booms experienced in the 1800s and early 1900s. The analysis additionally found that a majority of U.S.-bound migration was unlawful, with around 60% of migrants entering the U.S. since 2021 doing so without authorization.

The influx of unauthorized migrants and a lack of interior enforcement led to an incredible increase in the illegal migrant population. A June 2023 report from the Federation for American 🛂Immigration Reform found the illegal migrant population to have reached nearly 17 million, at an annual cost of roughly $150 billion to the American taxpayer.

Biden eventually signed an executive order that proved successful in lowering the number of asylum seekers appearing at the U.S.-Mexico border — but not until his final few months in office and after millions of foreign nationals had already made their way into the country.

Critics have consistently argued that the Biden administration fomented the border crisis early on with a string of executive actions that intentionally pulled back the security apparatus the first Trump administration had in place. Biden signed a total of 89 executive orders in his first year in office that specifically rolled back Trump-era 🛂Immigration policies, putting a halt to several well-known Trump-era border initiatives such as the Remain in Mexico program and ending construction on the border wall.

“I’m not sure that Biden was aware from day one what the policies were and what the effects would be,” Ruark said to the DCNF. “And then we had over three years of the White House and the Homeland Security secretary telling the American people that the border was secure, and then they shifted in the campaign to ‘it’s all Trump’s fault.’”

“There was no acknowledgement of what was happening. More importantly, there was no acknowledgment that it was their policies that led to this crisis,” Ruark continued.

Immediately upon entering office, Biden signed a moratorium on nearly all deportations for the first 100 days in office. While that order was ultimately struck down in court, he managed to dramatically curtail removals of illegal migrants from the U.S. 🛂Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out 59,011 deportations in fiscal year 2021, the lowest in the agency’s entire history.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas initially championed the reforms the Biden administration was making to the 🛂Immigration system.

“We have fundamentally changed 🛂Immigration enforcement in the interior. For the first time ever, our policy explicitly states that a non-citizen’s unlawful presence in the United States will not, by itself, be a basis for the initiation of an enforcement action,” Mayorkas said to CBS News in January 2022 regarding a new policy that restricted apprehension and deportation of an individual solely based on their illegal status.

Impoverished families across Latin America and elsewhere across the globe took notice of the lax enforcement reforms, and an unprecedented migration toward the U.S. border began.

Well over half a million migrants in 2023 crossed the Darien Gap, a vast jungle region that stretches between Colombia and southern Panama — a figure that was more than double from the previous year. The vast majority of those crossing hailed from Venezuela, while Colombians, Ecuadorians, Chinese and other foreign nationals were also among the masses.

By the end of fiscal year 2023, the southern border was averaging around 6,000 alien encounters a day. To put that in perspective, former Obama administration Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in 2019 that any number higher than 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms the system.”

As the 🛂Immigration crisis reached unprecedented levels, Americans soured on Biden’s ability to control the border. By June 2024, only 29% of Americans voiced approval of his handling on 🛂Immigration, the percentage of Americans in support of less migration reached its highest level in over 20 years and an outright majority of Hispanics supported deporting all illegal migrants from the U.S.

The situation at the border was fueling another crisis that had already been plaguing the American people for some years. CBP officials along the U.S.-Mexico border seized nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl in 2023, a record haul for the agency.

The crisis plaguing federal law enforcement officials along the southern border inevitably trickled into the interior of the country, wreaking havoc on the humanitarian safety nets established by major sanctuary cities.

Initially billing their cities as welcoming havens for incoming illegal migrants, New York City, Chicago, Denver and other jurisdictions later scrambled to roll back their migrant shelter services after spending billions in local taxpayer dollars and catching backlash from their constituents. Mayor Eric Adams has since shifted dramatically rightward against sanctuary city policy, and has even demanded New York City allow for more cooperation with ICE.

The migration crisis also opened the door to a ruthless migrant gang that first originated in a Venezuelan prison: Tren de Aragua.

“The Biden administration’s failure to secure the border allowed Tren de Aragua to build a foundation inside the United States,” John Fabbricatore, a retired ICE field office director, said to the DCNF. “Minimal vetting allowed in untold numbers of criminals and gang members.”

“Sanctuary cities enabled that foundation to strengthen, and the threat has now spread to over 22 states without the Biden administration taking any steps to stop it,” he continued.

Fabbricatore is no stranger to the brutality the gang has wrought on American communities. In Aurora, Colorado, not far from his own residence, Tren de Aragua gangbangers took control of multiple apartment complexes and have used the buildings to conduct their criminal enterprise. In one instance, gang members are suspected of having kidnapped a local couple and torturing them in one of the apartment buildings they had under their control.

The Department of Homeland Security currently suspects there may be hundreds of migrants in the U.S. with connections to Tren de Aragua. ICE agents have apprehended more than 100 individuals suspected of being tied to the gang in connection with criminal activity since October 2022.

President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term on Monday. The Republican has vowed to buckle down on enforcement measures like never before, pledging sweeping deportations of illegal migrants with a focus on those with criminal rap sheets and prior orders of removal, and the Republican reportedly plans to sign over 100 executive orders on day one of his administration.

While Trump is expected to largely paint over Biden’s 🛂Immigration legacy with his own tough-on-the-border policies, experts also acknowledged the outgoing Democrat left him with a situation that will be tough to clean up.

“With Trump coming in, we’re going to see a great reduction in illegal 🛂Immigration, but the question remains with what we’re going to do with the people who were let in under the Biden administration,” Ruark said to the DCNF. “A lot of them have been given work permits, they’ve been paroled and we’ve seen the extension of Temporary protected Status.”

“That’s a tall task for the incoming administration,” he said.

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