Chad Wolf, a former acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during the Trump administration, said that the ongoing illegal migrant crisis at America’s border could have been avoided.
“This is a crisis not because of a lack of resources or a lack of authorities. This is a crisis because of bad policies that were put in place almost two years ago,” he said.
“So, they could change this crisis, and they can help solve this crisis if they wanted to by implementing certain policies. They don’t want to do that. And so they will continue to tell you that they have a plan and that they’re executing this plan. But it doesn’t seem to be working. For 27 months now, it hasn’t worked.”
“And so I’m not sure that what they’re doing here recently is going to work either. Instead, what we see is astronomically and record-breaking numbers month after month after month.”
In regions like El Paso, Texas, even volunteers who welcome asylum-seekers are said to be alarmed by the rising numbers of illegal migrants.
Rising Migrant Numbers
According to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), border patrol agents only encountered 458,088 illegal aliens in the Southwest land border in fiscal year 2020.This jumped to 1.73 million in fiscal 2021, with monthly encounters rising to six digits after Joe Biden became president in January 2021. In fiscal 2022, encounters came in at 2.38 million. The first six months of fiscal 2023 has already seen 1.22 million encounters.
Talking about El Paso, Wolf pointed out that he saw “thousands of folks here earlier in the week on city streets because they’re doing mass releases into the streets.”
“They have no more capacity at CBP centers or in shelters. And so this is their plan that they’ve been executing for two years. God help us, because I’m not sure that this is going to be successful at the end of the day.”
GOP Criticism
Former president Donald Trump has slammed the Biden administration for allowing Title 42 to expire.Because of Biden, “our border is gone, our sovereignty is gone, our national security is gone.” Since coming to office, over 6.3 million illegal crossings have taken place under the Biden administration, Trump said.