Unsaid About “Biden’s” Immigration Trespasses: They Weren’t Biden’s

Democrats have learned their lesson on immigration, we hear. They won’t repeat “Joe Biden’s” “mistakes,” no, no, no. The preceding words are in quotation marks for good reason: At issue weren’t “mistakes.”

And they weren’t Joe Biden’s.

That’s the most rational conclusion, anyway.

This is highly relevant now because with Democrats running for office in the midterms, they’re running from “Biden’s immigration policies.” As the Washington Examiner puts it today in “Biden’s immigration failures went far beyond the border”:

President Joe Biden’s record on border security is so bad that his own party members regard it as toxic. Even far-left candidates such as James Talarico call themselves “border security” Democrats so as to distance themselves, if possible, from the abject failure of their past leader.

Well, Biden-era immigration policies are toxic to advocate if Democrats want to win election right now.

But they’re necessary to implement if they want to win elections in the future. (I.e., that’s how you import tomorrow’s leftist voters.)

Now, the Examiner is correct about Biden-era immigration failures going beyond the border. But is the outlet also correct in another assertion? To wit:

Despite Democrats’ current denials, they’d resurrect Biden-era immigration policies the first chance they got. A flashback from recent history provides some insight.

Not Called “President Autopen” for Nothing

In an early 2025 interview, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) related a telling story. He wanted to meet Biden in 2024, but for about two months the president’s staff erected roadblocks. Biden “doesn’t have time,” they claimed. (Yes, we all know how busy he was.) What were these handlers hiding?

Johnson found out when he finally could meet with Biden. Airing his concerns, he asked the president why he’d paused pending approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe.

Biden was stunned. He had no idea what Johnson was talking about and began arguing the matter. As RealClearPolitics related in January 2025:

“What I did is I signed this thing to, we’re going to conduct a study on the effects of LNG,” Johnson said Biden told him.

“It occurred to me, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.”

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, We’re in serious trouble. Who is running the country? I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

Is this surprising? Remember when late Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.) confessed in 2009 about Congress, “We don’t read most of the bills”? (Two thousand pages of statutory text aren’t exactly Ray Bradbury.)

Now, do you think doddering Biden was reading every (or any?) bill or order passing his desk?

Clearly, there were those who knew what was in those measures — but Biden wasn’t one of them.

With this in mind, consider the Examiner’s points. The Biden-era porous southern border was, the site notes, an inexcusable failure. Yet the unwillingness to enforce immigration law within our country was equally damnable. The Examiner then provides some statistics:

The foreign-born population of the United States grew by a record 8.3 million under the Biden administration, pushing its share of the country’s population to a record 15.8%. Not all of this growth was from illegal immigration, but the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the illegal population alone grew by 5.6 million. It includes not only those who crossed the southern border illegally but also others admitted legally on temporary visas who did not leave after their authorization expired.

With pressing “1 for English” and government documents printed in multifarious languages already standard, increasing our balkanization further is foolhardy. Yet this is precisely what illegal migration — and legal immigration — does. The Examiner then continues:

Each year, the State Department issues 10 million nonimmigrant visas. These include B-1s and B-2s for tourism and business, F-1 visas for students, H-2As for agricultural workers, H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, and other categories. Such visas permit temporary travel to the United States.

… [And s]ome 500,000 a year stay, becoming illegal immigrants just as those who crossed the border without authorization did. … DHS [Department of Homeland Security] reports almost 2 million suspected overstays during fiscal years 2021-2024 among nonimmigrants admitted through air and sea ports.

Putting Enforcement on Ice

Even more damning, however, are the apprehension/deportation statistics. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 3.1-plus million leads on suspected overstays or other violations during the four-year Biden era. And how many of these aliens were arrested?

Eight.

So the message was clear: The Biden administration had zero interest in enforcing immigration law.

The Examiner then mentions a 2021 memorandum from then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The site informs:

Mayorkas made clear that a criminal conviction alone was insufficient to establish that an illegal immigrant posed a current public safety threat. His memo specifically rejected automatically treating domestic violence as grounds for apprehension and removal.

ICE agents were required to consider “mitigating” factors. Let’s say, for example, that offenders had lived in the U.S. for a very long time. (I.e., had been really good at breaking the law.) Or let’s say that deporting them would affect their families. They’d likely get to stay. The result?

Even some dangerous criminals wouldn’t be deported.

Not to worry, though, the Democrats have changed, they swear. Yet as the Examiner points out, they still oppose sending migrants detained at the border back to Mexico. The problem:

The only other option is releasing them into the U.S. — the Biden-era policy.

And what of visa overstays?

The Democrats hiss when ICE deports such people. But they don’t reference or allude to an alternative solution, except one:

Grant the illegals citizenship — the Biden-era desire.

In contrast, net migration under the Donald Trump administration is historically low — perhaps the lowest since the 1930s.

Of course, many do emphasize the Biden-era’s immigration trespasses. What they don’t emphasize is that the “Biden”-era was not at all shaped by Biden. And do you really think his “handlers” went rogue, acting contrary to Democratic Party interests? The party certainly hasn’t made that claim.

The obvious conclusion is that they were advancing Democratic Party interests — and that what Biden didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him (only us).

An obvious corollary of this is the Examiner’s conclusion: The great American demographic replacement will resume the moment the Democrats regain power.

So relevant here is a twist on a line from a famous Democrat, Maya Angelou. When a party shows you what it is, believe it the first time.