DAILY WIRE
During President Joe Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office, the United States has experienced a truly gargantuan surge in illegal immigration along its southern border.
Since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, over 7 million people have illegally crossed the southern border, and the number of border encounters reported by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased every year Biden has been in office. Fiscal Years 2021 and 2o22 saw 1,734,686 and 2,378,944 encounters, respectively, while Fiscal Year 2023 recorded the highest number of annual encounters in U.S. history — 2,475,669. September alone saw nearly 270,000 encounters, the highest number of monthly encounters ever reported.
Democratic politicians, activists, and the mainstream media have repeatedly claimed over the last decade that the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States is close to 11 million, despite several surges in border crossings over the years. A report from the House Homeland Security Committee published on November 13 estimated that there are actually as many as 29 million illegal immigrants currently in the country.
Coinciding with the unprecedented border numbers, former president and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has expanded on his immigration agenda, promising to crack down on illegal border crossings if he is returned to the White House. A critical element of this updated agenda is his call for mass deportations of illegal immigrants already residing within the nation’s borders, according to the New York Times.
To achieve this, Trump has said that we would use certain laws, including the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expedite the removal of illegal immigrants without the need for due process hearings. He has also said he would reallocate personnel from other federal agencies as well as deputize local law enforcement and National Guard units to aid ICE in the deportation efforts.
Biden’s 2024 campaign has hurled a bevy of insults at Trump’s plan for mass deportations, calling it “scary,” “an affront” to the Constitution, “racist,” and “cruel.” The Biden administration has on numerous occasions dismissed the idea of mass deportations as a possible solution to illegal immigration, either by arguing the option is too cruel or too impractical.
During arguments before the Supreme Court regarding a case related to Biden’s deportation policy in November 2022, the administration’s lawyer said that it would be “impossible” to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, much less the up to 29 million estimated by the House Homeland Security Committee.
In February 2023, Biden himself said that he would not “consider” using mass deportations to remove illegal immigrants after Title 42, a health order authorizing border officials to immediately expel migrants without processing, expired.
“Reports that we are considering mass deportations of non-Mexicans to Mexico are false,” DHS spokeswoman Marsha Catron Espinosa stated.
The administration’s conviction that mass deportations would be “impossible” ignores one simple fact — it’s been done before. Not only has it been done before, but it was highly successful. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was able to deport over a million Mexican nationals in only a few months in 1954.
In fact, Trump referenced Eisenhower’s deportation program during a September rally in Iowa — “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
The origin of the illegal immigration problem the U.S. faced in the early 1950s can be traced back to the Bracero Program. The United States’ mobilization during World War II caused acute labor shortages in the agricultural industry as men either went to fight overseas or moved to the city to get more lucrative jobs in factories producing supplies for the war effort.