Media Brags About Deep State Plot To Stop Trump

 

Media Brags About Deep State Plot To Stop Trump

Shane Harris, AMAC Newsline 

After alleging for years that former President Donald Trump and his supporters are “conspiracy theorists” for warning about the Deep State’s attempts to undermine American democracy, the corporate media is now openly detailing the left’s plans to use the federal bureaucracy to undercut Trump should he win a second term this November.

On February 16, the Associated Press ran an article entitled, “Trump wants to fire thousands of government workers. Liberals are preparing to fight back if he wins.” The piece details how “liberal organizations in Washington” are “quietly trying to install roadblocks” to thwart Trump’s agenda if he returns to the White House.

“A collection of activists, advocates, and legal experts is promoting new federal rules to limit presidential power while urging Biden’s White House to do more to protect his accomplishments and limit Trump in a possible second term,” the AP reports. Some of those rules include efforts to make it more difficult for the president to fire career bureaucrats and place limits on the president’s authority over the military (something which would seem to be a flagrant violation of the Constitution).

At least part of this plan already appears to be taking effect. As the AP reports, Biden’s Office of Personnel Management is on track to finalize a new rule in April that would prohibit future administrations from reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers in order to make it easier to fire them. If Trump or any future president wanted to reverse the rule, he “would likely have to spend months — or even years — unwinding it.”

In other words, a major media outlet is now plainly acknowledging that there is an effort underway to ensure that, no matter the outcome of the election this fall, the federal bureaucracy will continue to implement Biden’s agenda. Not only that, but the AP is giving the scheme favorable coverage.

For conservatives, the idea that a cadre of liberal activists and bureaucrats are conspiring to stymie Trump’s policy priorities is hardly shocking. What is alarming, however, is the openness with which the media is now reporting on that effort – something which could signal the start of a campaign to legitimize an all-out mutiny by the federal bureaucracy should Trump win this November.

As far back as Trump’s 2016 campaign, conservatives have been sounding the alarm about schemes by career bureaucrats to influence election outcomes and otherwise undermine a duly elected president. In each case, Democrats and the liberal media have decried those warnings as “conspiracy theories” – only for those theories to be proven correct.

During the 2016 race, it was the “Russiagate” hoax, where the Obama administration, Clinton campaign, and corporate media conspired with top officials in the intelligence community to push the narrative that Trump was a “Russian asset.” Anyone who opposed or even questioned this narrative was slandered as a “Putin apologist,” while Trump and his top campaign operatives were also mocked by the media for claims that the FBI spied on his campaign.

It was only years later that the public learned definitively through Congressional investigations, the DOJ Inspector General’s report, and ultimately the Durham Report that, as the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it, “Trump really was spied on.” The “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative was completely fabricated in order to launch a bogus investigation into Trump.

While Trump ultimately overcame that plot, the Deep State continued its attempts to thwart and undermine Trump at every turn during his four years in office.

From intelligence officials feeding false reports to the media about a supposed “Russian bounties” program on U.S. troops, to bureaucrats throughout the government continuing to infuse left-wing climate change talking points into Trump administration documents, liberal-minded government workers attempted to use their offices to hamstring Trump’s agenda and ultimately his re-election bid. As Bloomberg reported in 2017, “Across the government, career staffers are finding ways to continue old policies, sometimes just by renaming a project.”

For the left, of course, these endeavors are heroic efforts to protect the country from Trump’s supposedly evil policies. As liberal commentator David Rothkopf, who wrote an entire book lauding the Deep State’s efforts to undermine Trump, argued in an interview with NPR, “Veteran government officials served as guardrails, preventing initiatives that were illegal, unworkable, immoral or against the country’s interests.”

What doesn’t appear to have occurred to Rothkopf – or anyone in the liberal establishment – is that it is voters, not bureaucrats, who are empowered by the Constitution to decide what is “immoral” and “against the country’s interests.” The American people make that decision at the ballot box, where they choose a leader to enact a specific agenda that taxpayer-funded government agencies exist to facilitate. The idea that unelected career bureaucrats should have the power to veto any policy they disagree with is completely antithetical to the Constitution and to the very idea of representative government.

However, the left has for the better part of a decade now been insisting that Trump is an existential threat to democracy who must be stopped at any cost. The idea of wielding the federal bureaucracy as a weapon against Trump and undermining the will of the voters in the process has now become so normalized that the AP can write about it and the story generates virtually no buzz in the wider media landscape.

If Trump wins re-election this November, reversing this plot to sabotage his second term may prove to be a necessary first step before pursuing any other policy priorities.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.

Putin's next victim

 

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Morning Glory: Putin's next victim

Hugh Hewitt, Fox News

Having murdered Navalny, Putin may do the same with another dissident unless our leaders speak up now...

Russian pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza is the name you need to know right now, the name that President Joe Biden, House Speaker Michael Johnson and both Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell need to be saying out loud and often this week and month and on a regular basis thereafter. 

Kara-Murza is the highest profile Russian dissident left after the murder of Aleksei Navalny last week, and Americans need to know his name, make his cause their own. (Though perhaps with President Biden, the less said by the fading Commander-in-Chief, the better. Not only might Biden’s intended words go sideways, any warning from Biden to Putin becomes an invitation to Putin to act and humiliate Biden, again.)

Ben Domenech, editor-at-large for the Spectator, called me about Kara-Murza on Friday. Kara-Murza is a man of extraordinary courage, who chose, like Navalny, to return to Russia after getting to the West, and chose to do so having already been marked as an enemy of Putin. Kara-Murza has survived two poisoning attempts and is now imprisoned in one of the Russian dictator’s Gulag 2.0 camps.

"For my part," Ben emailed after we spoke, "my concern is for my friend Vladimir Kara-Murza, currently in isolation. "He was a pallbearer for John McCain with me—and on Putin’s enemies list, he is in all likelihood the next target."

"Unlike Navalny," Ben continued, Kara-Murza "is a permanent resident of the United States — and his wife and three children are American citizens. If the Biden administration is to have any moral authority, any at all, they must use every tool at their disposal to get such prisoners out, and make Alexei Navalny the last dissident Vladimir Putin murders."

Unlike the Soviet Union, which as late as 1989 few people saw dissolving into ruin, most everyone who pays attention now knows Putin’s empire, like the power of any mob boss in any country at any time, will not survive a month after his demise. Until his demise—which won’t come from anyone like Kara-Murza, but from inside the Kremlin or his palace in Sochi—Putin can order any opponent killed and does so with complete indifference to, indeed disdain for Western reaction, largely because the reactions, however intense are always brief, and usually just rhetorical.

Putin doesn’t worry much, if at all, about Biden because Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, talks a tough game but does nothing when his bluff is called. Navalny, murdered last Friday, was Biden’s "red line" with Putin, and like Obama’s "red line" about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, dictators ignoring both presidents have paid no price. At all.

Under President Trump, Ukraine got the lethal aid that President Obama denied it. Assad got not one but two fusillades of cruise missiles from Trump when the Syrian war criminal used chemical weapons. When Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, then Secretary of Defense Mattis, acting on standing orders from Trump, directed that the Russians be wiped out and they were.

Trump talked like a man who wanted an understanding with his countries’ enemies, but slammed them hard when they broke the rules. Biden, like Obama, has made plenty of sweeping pronouncements about what countries should not and will not be allowed to do, but has never acted in the resolute fashion required to make Putin, or China’s and Iran’s dictators Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khamenei pause. The opposite actually.

What did Biden warn Putin about Nalvany? "When Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in 2021," The Guardian reminds us, "the leaders staring at each other across the library of a Geneva lakeside villa, the US president warned there would be ‘devastating consequences’ for Moscow if Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody."

In his new book about Team Biden, "The Internationalists: The Fight To Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump," Politico’s Alexander Ward, quotes his sources as saying after the Summit in June of 2021 that "Biden left the meetings telling his aides he got his message through to Putin." The book published Monday, three days after Putin had Navalny killed. Another great Biden assessment of the world around him that was exactly opposite of the realities of the world.

When Navalny died in Russian custody, Biden made another statement. The aging-before-our-eyes president expressed "outrage" but, incredibly, admitted he was "not surprised." Not even Joe Biden expects America’s enemies to take Joe Biden seriously. "Under President Biden America has been seen continuously as being in retreat from the rest of the world," British journalist Douglas Murray wrote in The Telegraph Monday. Murray is right of course.

This downward spiral in the ability of America to deter its enemies from the grossest displays of absolute and arbitrary power by evil men began with Obama and Syria, but accelerated with Biden ordering the scamper from Afghanistan in 2021 and the fiasco that followed which concluded with the deaths of U.S.troops at Abbey Gate and the abandonment of thousands of American citizens, green card holders, and allies eligible for SIV visas.

Then came Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine. Biden had talked a tough game then too, but hadn’t delivered what Ukraine needed to deter Putin from invading. Since that invasion, which Team Biden repeatedly telegraphed Ukraine could not endure and would not survive, the aid the U.S. has sent has been "too little, too late and too long," leaving a World War I-like stalemate and an exhausted American public Biden should be out rallying the country to stand with Ukraine still, but the president simply doesn’t have the physical stamina much less the brainpower to make such a series of speeches and sit for interviews to argue the case for keeping the aid flowing to Ukraine. He hasn’t even tried.

Instead, the often-confused president is "leading" a walk-back of America’s previously unequivocal support for Israel in the aftermath of the 10/7 massacre there. The entire Israeli Cabinet and almost every serious political actor in Israel has rejected Biden’s attempt to impose a Palestinian state on the Middle East, a imposition which any sane person would recognize as a reward for barbarism.

Don’t underestimate Biden’s ability to make a terrible situation worse, which is why I’m ambivalent about Biden saying anything about Kara-Murza. Former Secretary of Defense Gates, the equal of any figure in America when it comes to bipartisan respect, warned us all that Biden’s instincts and decisions are always—repeat, always—wrong on national security. The consequences for Navalny, like those for Ukraine and Afghanistan, have been the worst possible outcomes.

It used to be that the U.S. could at least keep a dissident alive, and perhaps we still can with focus and with "better-late-than-never" reprisals aimed squarely at disintermediating Putin’s and his cronies’ vast and stolen wealth. But public pressure to protect people like Kara-Murza has to be bipartisan and sustained, as it was for then dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky in the closing decades of the Soviet era.

The United States doesn’t have the staying power it did when it took up its position opposing the Soviets in 1946. The Greatest Generation not only destroyed the Nazis and Imperial Japan, it educated its children—the Boomers—on the evils of totalitarians generally and communists specifically. If dictators were called out, their crimes publicized, their dissenters made known to the West, at least the Soviet Politburo was hesitant to kill its high-profile dissidents. The Boomers have failed to impress this duty of protection on younger generations. Putin, China’s dictator Xi Jinping and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei care not at all about Biden’s mumblings, just as they ignored Obama’s word salad announcements on history’s inevitable direction.

That indifference can be changed if the U.S. makes its case against the tyrants rather than spending time undermining our allies like Israel. Watch this week for any follow up on Biden’s threat about Navalny. I hope I’m wrong in expecting less than nothing. Given the empty office at the top, others can and should step up to at least speak out for other imprisoned dissidents.

Keep Vladimir Kara-Murza on your lips and in your prayers.

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

Spineless Joe Biden = a full betrayal of Israel

 

Spineless Joe Biden is inching toward a full betrayal of Israel

Michael Goodwin, New York Post 

Is there a Margaret Thatcher in the house who can help stiffen Joe Biden’s spine?

The late British prime minister, in a 1990 phone call during the early days of the first Gulf war, famously told a hesitant President George H. W. Bush that it “was no time to go wobbly.”

As Thatcher recounts in her first memoir, “The Downing Street Years,” Bush appeared reluctant to act decisively following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Although the United Nations Security Council approved a trade embargo of Iraq, it was left largely to the US and UK to enforce it.

Fortunately, Bush adopted the Iron Lady’s resolve and soon unleashed Operation Desert Storm, leading to a retreat of Iraq’s forces and a smashing allied triumph.

Biden needs a Thatcher now to set him straight during the current Mideast conflict.

Faced with Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and a shaky re-election campaign, the president isn’t just going wobbly in his support for our embattled ally — he’s inching toward a full betrayal of Israel to appease American radicals.

His actions and statements are more troubling than those of the officials Thatcher ridiculed as “faint hearts” or “drifting with the tide.”

It is dishonest to defend Biden’s undercutting of Israel as part of some strategic view of how to bring a just and lasting peace to the region.

His words and actions increasingly have little to do with peace and everything to do with pandering to domestic political critics.

A timeline of the president’s shifting attitude shows his position, which began as forceful backing of Israel after the Oct. 7 invasion by Hamas, changed as large parts of the Democrats’ base made it clear they would not vote for him because of his support for Israel.

Some of those people, who include Muslim Americans and leftist students at elite colleges, can be charitably described as ignorant of both history and current events, especially their absurd accusations that Israel is committing “genocide.”

They claim to be concerned about the suffering of Palestinian civilians, but voiced no concern that Hamas uses those civilians as human shields and turned Gaza into a terrorist launching pad while stealing billions of foreign aid.

Nor are they moved by the horrific events of Oct. 7, including the slaughter of Israeli children and the raping and torture of women.

Many other Biden objectors are classic antisemites who oppose Israel’s very existence.

These so-called protesters, some of them violent, don’t try to hide their support for Hamas’ plan to control all land “from the river to the sea.”

Antisemitism at home

Biden makes no distinction about the critics’ motivations and is disgracefully mute about the shocking explosion of antisemitism in America.

Instead, in a recent meeting with Muslim voters in Michigan, an administration aide — not a campaign aide —  arrived full of apologies and said the White House knows it made mistakes in its approach.

“We are very well aware that we have misstepped in the course of responding to this crisis,” said deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, according to a recording obtained by CBS News.

Days earlier, the White House slapped sanctions on four Israelis in the West Bank, accusing them of violence toward Palestinians.

Then aides announced last week they were investigating whether Israel misused American munitions in Gaza.

To put further distance between the two governments, Biden flunkies leak that he intensely dislikes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and disparages him as an “asshole.”

He tells donors Israeli bombing was “indiscriminate” and mumbles at a press conference that Israel’s reaction to Oct. 7 is “over the top.”

His words sting, but his policies are far more dangerous.

They include a demand for an immediate cease-fire before Hamas has been eliminated or releases its hostages, some of them American citizens.

If the war stopped now, the terror group would retain control of Gaza.

It would also siphon off much of the billions of dollars likely to be contributed to rebuilding, just as it now seizes much of the daily humanitarian aid.

Similarly, Biden’s push for the creation of a Palestinian state rewards Hamas’ brutality and would result in perpetual war that could become a global conflict.

Hamas’ open hatred

It is also astonishing that Biden ignores how Hamas leaders in Qatar and Lebanon say publicly they will not accept any “two-state solution” because it implies acceptance of a Jewish state.

“I would like to say two things about the two-state solution. First, we have nothing to do with the two-state solution,” Hamas official Khaled Mashal said in a TV interview.

“We reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity.

He added: “This is unacceptable.”

That’s not an unusual view.

Polling shows up to 80% of all Palestinians support Hamas’ invasion, including a big majority in the West Bank.

Some historians compare the challenge of Palestinian state-building to the denazification of Germany after World War II.

Does Biden see that?

Most appalling, his policies skirt around Iran’s role. It is the head of the snake and directs and finances every terror group calling for Israel’s destruction, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Every one of the president’s criticisms of Israel and his effort to micromanage and curtail its military strategy must come as welcome news to Iran and those proxies.

As such, Biden gives them no reason to change their ways.

The job of selling his pre-election snake oil falls to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who is spewing nonsense in his ’round-the-region shuttles.

Lately he’s been marketing a Palestinian state to Israel as the key to unlock normalization agreements with Arab states.

“Virtually every Arab country now genuinely wants to integrate Israel into the region to normalize relations . . .  to provide security commitments and assurances so that Israel can feel more safe,” Blinken said Saturday at the annual Munich Security Conference.

“And there’s also, I think the imperative, that’s more urgent than ever, to proceed to a Palestinian state that also ensures the security of Israel.”

Blinken, like his boss, conveniently ignores two enormous facts: First, the Trump administration secured the Abraham Accords with four Muslim nations without endangering Israel’s survival.

And Saudi Arabia was moving toward normalization last year without a Palestinian state, which Hamas cited as a reason for its attack on Israel.

Second, there is no credible vision for a Palestinian state that ensures the security of Israel.

It’s an oxymoron, as has been proven repeatedly for 75 years.

Hamas’ invasion was different only in the scale of its fiendish success.

It brought about the largest single-day loss of Jewish life since the end of the Holocaust.

And it is committed to doing the same thing again and again.

Is Biden so addled that he doesn’t understand that?

Or is he so fixated on a second term that he doesn’t care?

Toyota Resisted EV Mania

 

Toyota Resisted EV Mania.

Now, It’s Raking In The Cash While Competitors Take Losses

Nick Pope, The Daily Caller

Toyota drew activist criticism when it did not quickly embrace electric vehicles (EVs) like many of its major competitors, but the Japanese auto giant now appears to be in better financial shape than its American adversaries.

Toyota is riding a windfall of hybrid vehicle sales on its way to posting projected net profits of more than $30 billion for the fiscal year ending in March, more than a year after then-CEO Akio Toyoda cautioned that the EV transition will “take longer than the media would like us to believe,” according to Fortune. While the company drew the ire of environmentalists and activists for its hesitance on EVs, the company’s measured approach has been vindicated given the major losses that Toyota’s competitors are taking on their EV product lines, market experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Toyota, including its subsidiaries, has posted impressive 2023 numbers. The company complemented its profit projections with a 6.6% increase in sales relative to 2022, thanks in part to its hybrid sales: Toyota sold nearly 15,000 pure EVs, 40,000 plug-in hybrids and more than 600,000 non-rechargeable hybrids in the U.S. in 2023, according to InsideEVs.

The Biden administration is regulating and spending big to push EVs on American consumers, with a stated goal of having EVs make up 50% of all new vehicle sales by 2030. Proposed tailpipe emissions standards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would go even further if finalized, effectively requiring two-thirds of all new light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 to be EVs. Despite these efforts, the EV market is struggling, evidenced by slower-than-anticipated growth in consumer demand and reports of EVs piling up on dealers’ lots.

“In the automotive world, as with almost everything else, there’s no one-size-fits-all option for consumers,” Mark Mills, a distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and an expert on the automobile market, told the DCNF.

The overt and subtle pressures of the administrative state are primarily responsible for the American manufacturers’ continued commitment to massively increasing EV production, Mills said, adding that mandates that seem far away today are not too distant for automakers because design cycles, capital investments and supply chain plans must be made several years in advance of the eventual manufacture and sale of a line of vehicles.

Ford, for example, much more readily embraced the EV transition under the Biden administration. The company previously planned to be able to produce 300,000 EVs per year by 2023, and 2 million annually by 2026, but it delayed or missed both targets, according to NPR.

Moreover, Ford lost approximately $65,000 on every EV that it did sell in 2023, posting a $4.7 billion loss on its EV product line, according to a summary of the company’s 2023 financial performance. This year, the company is expecting to lose somewhere between $5 billion and $5.5 billion on its EV products. The company had a net profit of $4.3 billion in 2023.

Ford plans to mimic Toyota and more significantly lean into its hybrid models in the near future, according to Electrek. The company is also “slowing down” about $12 billion of investment into its EV business, as CFO John Lawler put it.

Toyota appears to be in better shape than competitors like Ford “because Toyota chooses to be less guided by central planners and political correctness and more by consumers, who want affordable, fuel-efficient vehicles that are not battery range-limited, do not take hours to recharge, and have convenient access to widespread refueling infrastructure,” Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “The EV production cutbacks, Ford’s multi-billion-dollar EV losses, and the bloated inventories of unsold EVs on dealer lots amply vindicate Toyota’s initial skepticism. That skepticism has paid off in both sales and profits, big time.”

Notably, Toyota was late to arrive to the EV market in the first place, deciding against widely marketing any all-electric products until 2020, trailing many competing companies that had been manufacturing and selling EVs for years before Toyota established an EV-focused office, according to Slate.

Ford is not the only major American manufacturer that has struggled with the relatively rapid embrace of EVs. General Motors, the largest automaker in the U.S., has backed off of its goal to manufacture 400,000 EVs by the middle of this year. The company missed its 2023 EV production target by about 50%, but it said in December 2023 that it anticipates EVs will begin to generate profits at some point in 2025.

Ford is different from General Motors in that it separates most of the financial information about its EV product lines from the other segments of its operation, whereas the other companies do not. Thus, it is difficult to gauge exactly how General Motors’ EV products are performing relative to those of Ford, but the fact that General Motors is revisiting previously-stated EV production commitments suggests that the firm may not have extreme confidence in EVs’ ability to generate considerable profits in the near-term. Stellantis, the third major American manufacturer, is bringing its first EVs into the U.S. market during the first quarter of 2024.

“Toyota most definitely has been vindicated,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF about Toyota’s measured approach to the EV transition. “We have seen numerous pieces of evidence that Americans don’t want to take up this technology at the rate that the government wants to see … Inexpensive transportation is an American birthright and iconic — it is celebrated in American movies and American songs. Trying to interfere with something that is a birthright for Americans is a complete anathema to the diverse majority of people who live in America.”

About half of all Americans have little or no interest in purchasing an EV the next time they go to buy a car, while 13% do not plan to purchase a vehicle of any variety, according to a July 2023 Pew Research poll. About 38% of respondents indicated that they are at least somewhat interested in purchasing an EV as their next automobile.

The administration’s policies are principally to blame for the fact that legacy American manufacturers are losing vast sums of money on EVs, as major corporations typically do not voluntarily continue to engage in practices that lose them billions of dollars, Furchtgott-Roth told the DCNF.

Toyota declined to comment for this story. Ford and General Motors did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

A Border Crisis By Design

 

A Border Crisis By Design

It is unequivocally the intended result of Biden administration policy.

Jeffrey H. Anderson, City Journal 

Three years into the border crisis, most Americans still don’t understand what’s actually happening at the border. This lack of understanding extends to the mainstream press and to most Republicans, who have struggled to communicate effectively on the issue.

The cause of the current crisis is President Joe Biden’s unprecedented refusal to enforce federal immigration law, which requires that all asylum-seekers be detained rather than released into the United States. The solution, therefore, is for Biden to start enforcing federal law as he is constitutionally required to do—or for Congress to deny the president something else he wants until he does.

Many observers, however, seem unclear about the cause of the crisis. Praising a not-yet-released Senate immigration bill, which a trio of senators is currently negotiating with the White House behind closed doors, the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes that “the President needs Congress to fix the underlying incentives at the border.” But the president, not Congress, has created the incentives that have attracted so many illegal aliens, by offering a near guarantee that asylum-seekers will get released into the U.S. rather than detained as their claims are adjudicated.

Under presidents of both parties before 2021, those trying to enter the U.S. illegally at least had to evade the authorities. This hasn’t been true under Biden. U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell writes that U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) Chief Raul Ortiz “testified that the current surge differs from prior surges that he [has] seen over his lengthy career in that most of the aliens now being encountered at the Southwest Border are turning themselves in to USBP officers rather than trying to escape the officers.” Ortiz, whom the Biden administration selected as chief, said that aliens are likely “turning themselves in because they think they’re going to be released.”

The difference in the number of releases under Biden and under his immediate predecessor is like the contrast between the Himalayas and a pitcher’s mound. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, in December 2020, the last full month under President Donald Trump, the USBP released 17 aliens into the U.S. In December 2023, the most recent month for which statistics are available under Biden, the USBP released 191,142 aliens into the U.S. In other words, the USBP released 0.009 percent as many aliens into the U.S. during the final month under Trump as it did during the most-recent month under Biden—for every one alien released under Trump, 11,244 were released under Biden. That’s not a normal increase; it’s a flash flood.

In all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Biden administration released 2 million aliens into the U.S. in fiscal year (FY) 2023. In addition, the CBO estimates that there were 750,000 “got-aways”—those detected crossing the border but not apprehended. This gives a rough sense of what’s driving this crisis: for every three people who were detected crossing the border but got away, there were eight people—nearly three times as many—who were apprehended between the ports of entry, or deemed inadmissible at a port of entry, yet were released into the U.S. in defiance of federal law.

The prospective Senate bill would reportedly let the president “shut down the border” if the average number of migrant crossings were to surpass 4,000 a day over the span of a week, and it would mandate such action if there were 8,500 illegal crossings on a given day. Oklahoma senator James Lankford, the sole Republican playing a lead role in the negotiations, appeared on Face the Nation on January 28 and suggested that he believes the Biden administration’s line that it is releasing so many aliens into the country because there are simply too many to detain them.

In truth, the reason why there are so many aliens to detain is because word has gotten out that if you come and request asylum, you’ll be released into the U.S.—and this has been the case since Biden took office. As Judge Wetherell put it in a 2023 immigration case, the Biden administration’s actions have been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.” As word has spread, the numbers at the border have massively increased, with the most recent month on record (December 2023) being the worst month to date.

For his part, Biden claims that if the prospective Senate bill “were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly”—thereby implying that Congress is at fault. This flips the truth on its head. What’s more, even if the bill were to pass and Biden were to “shut down the border,” it’s not as if the flow would stop: people cross the border illegally on a daily basis already.

Such a “shutdown” would reportedly “suspend asylum [claims] in between official ports of entry” but apparently wouldn’t stop people from claiming asylum at the ports.  According to CBS News, during a so-called shutdown of the border, the bill “would preserve asylum at official ports of entry”—indeed, it “would require U.S. border officials to continue processing more than 1,400 asylum-seekers daily at these official border crossings.” So, this means that another half-a-million illegal aliens would be released into the U.S. annually, even if the border were “shut down” all year.

In reality, having a “Come In, We’re Open” sign at each port of entry, while discouraging rampant crossings of the border between the ports, reflects the Biden administration’s goals. In a 2022 interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether “it is the objective of the Biden administration to reduce—sharply reduce—the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.” Strikingly, Mayorkas refused to answer yes, instead immediately replying, “It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.”

What Mayorkas meant by this is that the administration wants illegal aliens to come not to random places along the border but to the ports of entry—from whence they will be released into the interior of the country. The Biden administration and the mainstream media insist on calling this “lawful” entry. The law, however, requires that those who enter the U.S. without proper documentation be continuously detained until their claim can be adjudicated, since they lack the documents to enter lawfully.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states that if “an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained for a [removal] proceeding.” It also declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Justice Samuel Alito writes that these detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.”

The Biden administration asserts that it can use “parole” or “prosecutorial discretion” to release illegal aliens into the U.S. as it sees fit, but this policy plainly violates federal law. Quoting the INA, Chief Justice John Roberts writes for the Supreme Court, “DHS may exercise its discretion to parole applicants ‘only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.’” In the past, DHS has construed this language to mean that those who would qualify might include, for example, someone who needs emergency medical care (for urgent humanitarian reasons) or an alien scheduled to be a witness in a trial (providing significant public benefit). The Biden administration is construing it to mean essentially anyone.

The administration’s primary justification for releasing massive numbers of aliens into the U.S. is that it doesn’t have the space or personnel to detain them as the law requires. But as a 2023 DHS Inspector General report notes, “Since FY 2019, Congress has authorized most of the law enforcement personnel that CBP and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] requested.” Judge Wetherell observes that DHS had the capacity to detain an average daily population (ADP) of 55,000 just five years ago, but under the Biden administration “DHS requested a reduction to 32,500 ADP for fiscal year 2022” and for FY 2023 “requested a further reduction to 25,000 ADP.”

Congress nevertheless approved funding for 34,000 ADP for FY 2023. This year, in its 119-page FY 2024 Budget in Brief—under the heading of “Major Decreases”—DHS requested that detention space be reduced to 25,000 ADP for FY 2024, touting that this would save $555 million versus 2023 outlays. In short, the Biden administration is claiming that there isn’t enough detention space, while simultaneously proposing further reductions in detention space.

The Biden administration’s catch-and-release—or welcome-and-release—policy has also had the effect of making it easier for others to evade capture along the open border. Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge currently at the Center for Immigration Studies, explains that “many if not most” border patrol agents are now “stuck transporting and processing migrants before they are released,” rather than policing the open border.

Why would anyone feel the need to cross the open border when the Biden administration would willingly let them in at a port of entry if they utter the password “asylum”? Well, if one is a drug-smuggler, a terrorist, or someone with a criminal record in the U.S., one might rather cross the open border than risk an encounter at a port of entry. We don’t know how many potential terrorists have crossed the southwest border under Biden without getting caught, but we do have strong evidence of a huge increase in the number who have tried. According to CBP statistics, from FY 2018 through FY 2020—the three full fiscal years under Trump—USBP had only nine encounters along the southwest border with noncitizens on the terrorist watch list. In just the first two-and-one-quarter fiscal years entirely under Biden (FY 2022 through the first quarter of FY 2024), USBP had 316 such encounters—a 35-fold increase overall, and a 47-fold increase per month.

Even apart from aiding terrorists, drug-smugglers, and the like, the effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce federal law have been profound. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in less than three years under Biden, the United States’s foreign-born population over the age of 16 rose by 5 million (from 43,086,000 in January 2021 (Table A-7) to 48,049,000 in December 2023). That’s enough to populate a new Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. combined.

Why is Biden releasing millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.? Because he thinks that his notion of “equity”—which he extends to non-U.S. citizens—requires it. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order declaring that his administration would pursue a policy of “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” In a subsequent document, DHS quoted that passage from Biden and made clear that it was applying it “[i]n the immigration and enforcement context.”

In other words, the situation at the border is by design. What most Americans think of as a “crisis,” the Biden administration regards as a success.

Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative and served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.