Biden’s Border Team Should Be in PRISON

Joe Biden greets people at an indoor event — Photo: Michael F. Hiatt / Shutterstock

The core dispute is not whether the Southwest border experienced record strain in recent years—it did—but whether policy choices, rather than global pressures, primarily drove those volumes and what that implies for accountability. The public conversation often leaps to motive; the evidence is strongest on outcomes and chronology, weaker on intent.

The Short Version

Southwest-border encounters climbed to unprecedented levels during the Biden years, documenting severe operational stress on DHS and local communities.
Key Trump-era controls were altered or ended amid rising flows; critics link those choices to subsequent surges, but causation is contested.
Encounter counts measure workload and attempted entries, not unique admissions or permanent settlement; repeat crossings are common.
By mid-2024, the administration implemented rules limiting entry and asylum eligibility and reported notable reductions in encounters.

What the numbers actually show—and what they don’t

Border-management debate starts with a clear statistical reality: CBP recorded historically high Southwest-border encounters in FY2021–FY2023, peaking at roughly 2.48 million in FY2023. Those figures measure the volume of enforcement touchpoints—Border Patrol apprehensions between ports and Office of Field Operations inadmissibles at ports—rather than the number of unique people who ultimately entered and stayed. Repeat attempts are counted each time. Analysts who aggregate the period from early 2021 through late 2024 identify roughly 8.6 million encounters and underscore that many reflect repeat crossers, which inflates raw totals as a proxy for unique arrivals. The implication is straightforward: encounters are an excellent indicator of operational strain, but a blunt instrument for adjudicating downstream outcomes like admissions, long-term presence, or electoral impact.

That distinction matters. It has been common in political rhetoric to conflate large “encounter” totals with a government decision to admit a like number of people; the dataset does not support that equivalence. It does, however, document extraordinary pressure on holding capacity, transport, asylum processing, removal operations, and the many municipal systems—shelters, schools, hospitals—drawn into the spillover.

Policy changes, timing, and the disputed causal chain

The second pillar of the argument centers on chronology. Critics point to early 2021 decisions—curtailing aspects of Title 42 expulsions for some populations, signaling the wind-down of Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), shifting parole and release practices—as choices that weakened deterrence and were followed by sharp upticks in encounters. The logic is intuitive: if penalties fall and access widens, attempted crossings rise. Congressional materials catalog these steps and juxtapose them with subsequent monthly spikes, framing a narrative of cause and effect.

The counter-case emphasizes confounders: the pandemic’s economic scarring, cartel adaptation, collapsing governance in sending states, and hemispheric migration surges that predated and outlasted specific U.S. policy toggles. The administration, and independent analysts, further note that Title 42 expulsions remained in effect until May 2023 and that, after additional restrictions on entry and asylum were imposed in mid-2024, encounters fell markedly—suggesting policy matters, but not in a single direction or along a simple partisan axis. We are left with a defensible but incomplete inference: policy changes influenced flows, yet isolating their marginal effect from global drivers requires formal causal analysis, not post hoc juxtaposition.

How enforcement actually functioned on the ground

Operational detail clarifies some of the apparent contradictions. During most of the Biden period, Title 42—a public-health authority permitting rapid expulsions—coexisted with conventional Title 8 immigration enforcement. The practical application varied by nationality, diplomatic acceptance of returns, age (notably for unaccompanied minors), and capacity constraints. That mosaic produced uneven deterrence: quick expulsions for some groups, more complex processing for others. When Title 42 ended, DHS rolled out the “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule in 2023 and a new proclamation and interim final rule in June 2024 that restricted entry and asylum eligibility for those crossing unlawfully when daily encounter thresholds were exceeded. DHS subsequently reported fewer releases pending proceedings, more expedited removals, and a short-run drop in encounters following the June 2024 measures.

These facts complicate maximalist claims on both sides. The border was not “open”—hundreds of thousands were expelled or removed under Title 42 and Title 8—but capacity and policy design did create predictable incentives that smugglers and migrants tested. Conversely, later restrictions correlated with lower flows, indicating that enforcement posture can alter behavior, though the durability of such effects depends on international conditions and bureaucratic execution.

Local experience and the politics of crisis

Border communities experienced the crisis viscerally: surges that closed bridges, disrupted commerce, and strained services. Local testimony from leaders who pressed for immediate federal and cross-border interventions underscores the gap between Washington’s policy cadence and the pace of events at the line—an enduring feature of U.S. border governance irrespective of party. It is here that the encounter-versus-admission distinction offers little comfort; whatever the ultimate adjudication outcome, concentrated inflows can overwhelm finite local and federal systems in real time. The political consequence is predictable: high-visibility operational stress becomes proof, for critics, of permissive policy; for defenders, it illustrates global displacement dynamics that no single administration can deflect unilaterally.

What the strongest evidence supports—and what remains unproven

Three assessments hold under rigorous scrutiny. First, the United States saw historically high enforcement encounters at the Southwest border during the Biden years, documenting extraordinary workload for CBP and partner agencies. Second, the administration altered several Trump-era controls while flows were rising, and policy design choices—exemptions, processing pathways, communication signals—were plausibly part of the demand environment that smugglers and migrants perceived. Third, claims that officials engineered policy with the specific aim of partisan electoral advantage are not supported by named directives, sworn admissions, or documentary records in the materials at hand; the evidentiary gap on motive is significant and persistent.

Equally, the late-term restrictions matter. After the 2024 proclamation and rule limiting entry and asylum eligibility, official materials report notable short-run reductions in encounters and changes in release and removal patterns—evidence that, within legal and diplomatic constraints, policy can tighten outcomes when administrators choose to accept the trade-offs such tightening entails.

What a serious accountability agenda would examine next

Accountability should move from rhetoric to audit. The essential questions are empirical and tractable: quantify the marginal effect of each policy change on encounter volumes by nationality; disaggregate outcomes—expulsion, detention, parole, release with notice, removal—by month and sector; and measure processing times to final disposition. A credible study would pre-register its causal model, use monthly CBP microdata, and explicitly account for conditions in origin and transit countries. Parallel transparency steps—publishing transcribed interviews with former Border Patrol and CBP leaders, releasing non-privileged DHS and White House communications, and standardizing capacity metrics—would convert claims into testable propositions. Only then can the debate shift from broad-brush accusations to evidence-grounded reform.