Some readers will remember “Baghdad Bob,” the Saddam Hussein regime’s spokesman during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, who confidently claimed “There are no American tanks in Baghdad!” as American tanks were literally in the background.
The Biden administration has its own Baghdad Bob — White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Some of her pronouncements are just silly, like her claim that the decrepit President Biden has so much energy “I can’t even keep up with him.”
But this week’s howler was a much more consequential lie.
When asked about congressional concerns about the border crisis, she said, “The president has done more to secure the border, to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else. He really has.”
You might dismiss this as a laughable but harmless fairy tale, like Biden’s supposedly boundless energy, but it has real policy consequences. The border crisis the president sparked on Inauguration Day has continued unabated ever since.
Nearly 7 million illegal aliens have been “encountered” on Biden’s watch, the highest number ever.
And of those, close to 3 million have been released into the United States (the others were expelled under the now-defunct Title 42 or were just the same people being counted multiple times for multiple attempts).
It would be more accurate to say that Biden has done more to undermine the border than anyone else. “He really has.”
In a bad sign for the White House, even the regime-adjacent media are beginning to acknowledge that its claims are malarkey.
This week The Washington Post reported that Border Patrol arrests of border-jumpers climbed more than 30% in August, on top of a 30%-plus increase in July. And of the average of nearly 6,000 border-infiltrators a day last month, about half were in “family migrant units” — illegal immigrants bringing children with them — the highest level ever recorded.
Why is this happening? Is it climate change? Gang violence? Transphobia?
No. As my Center for Immigration Studies colleague Todd Bensman reported in the New York Post — three months ago — the administration’s supposedly tough rules following the end of Title 42 expulsions in May aren’t applied to illegal aliens bringing kids with them.
Immigrant families with children have now figured out that, if they cross illegally and turn themselves in under the supposedly harsh new strategy, Biden’s Border Patrol will very quickly admit all of them right into the American heartland just like when the government exempted them from Title 42.
To borrow from “Field of Dreams,” If you release them, they will come.
To combat this, the administration has been issuing multiple press releases boasting that “ICE conducts single adult, family unit removal flights.”
More malarkey.
While The Washington Post was getting those leaked numbers from the Border Patrol, CBS News this week reported on leaked numbers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing how few border-jumping families have actually been deported.
The lede says it all:
The U.S. has carried out fewer than 100 deportations under a program the Biden administration set up in May to deter unlawful entries by migrant families, a fraction of the tens of thousands of families processed by border agents during that time period, government data obtained by CBS News show.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Even if you add to the count those illegal-immigrant families who took what’s known as “voluntary return” rather than formal deportation, it’s still that case that nearly 90% of them were let into the United States.
Those are pretty good odds if you’re weighing whether it’s worth it to incur the debt and physical risk of coming to America illegally.
Those odds mean mass illegal immigration will continue so long as the root cause remains.
And the root cause is napping in the Oval Office.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.