OPINION:
Murder is the most dreadful of crimes; a murder that could have been averted is the most heartbreaking of all. The killing of Americans resulting from illegal immigration can be counted among those preventable deaths. President Joe Biden’s lax border security is directly responsible for deaths that otherwise would not be occurring, making his refusal to halt the ongoing tragedy the most callous of leadership failures.
Prior to the Biden era, homicide and manslaughter convictions among illegals averaged fewer than four annually for five years. They skyrocketed to 60 during the president’s first fiscal year in office, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. Another 53 have been recorded so far during fiscal 2022, which ends Sept. 30.
Every cross-section of humanity is intermingled with the angelic and devilish alike, and distinguishing one sort from the other isn’t possible by appearance alone. Hence, nations throughout history have relied on border security as a smart safeguard for their citizenry – but not Joe Biden’s United States.
Illegal immigrants have poured across the southern border month after month, promising to heap a record figure for August atop the 3.5 million encounters reported thus far in Mr. Biden’s term of office. All the while, expulsions have fallen steadily from a near-total 93% of apprehensions in April 2020 to a turning point in July 2021 when CBP figures show most illegals were allowed to stay. Jarringly, the cumulative total of Biden border crossers is soon to match the population of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city.
To be sure, Mr. Biden may not be the only president to preside over border security as leaky as a screen door on a submarine. President Donald Trump, for one, suffered a spike of 133,000 illegal entries in May 2019. Mr. Biden, however, has knowingly opened the border and fled the scene, forcing underlings to deal with the fallout. U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said as much when he admitted under oath during a lawsuit deposition that since Mr. Biden’s election, immigrants perceive illegal U.S. entry as carrying “no consequences.”
That the president’s border administrators are transporting illegals by the thousands to far-flung U.S. cities and towns rather than returning them to their places of origin demonstrates conscious intent to nullify existing immigration law. The sudden surge of murders perpetrated by illegals, then, can only be regarded as a political cost that the man behind the Resolute Desk judges as acceptable.
If Mr. Biden can live with a handful of dozen preventable murders, how many innocents must perish before he reckons their numbers intolerable? Tolerance of victimization should never be normalized, as Joseph Stalin proved in the breach. Russia’s murderous autocrat has been credited with famously saying, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Good-hearted Americans appreciate the contributions of legal immigrants who share their values. They are less complimentary, though, toward those whose initial arrival on U.S. soil constitutes an act of lawlessness. They will not long countenance a deadly Biden border that features a “welcome” mat for the virtuous and wicked alike. To do so is to surrender America.
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