Democrats are rushing to fix their failed sanctuary city and open border schemes

President Biden has extended Democrats’ sanctuary city policies to the southern border. It’s not complicated; the two are connected. 

Combined, Democrats have created a self-reinforcing crisis that is beyond their willingness to control. Instead, they are desperately trying to find someone else to solve what their leftist extremists won’t let them fix. Their hope now is that Sunday’s Senate bill will.

America is in the throes of an undeniable illegal immigration crisis that continues to break records under Biden. Illegal crossings over the southern border in December hit 250,000, 31 percent higher than November’s number (119,112) and 13 percent over December 2022’s total, which had been the previous record.   

Of course, it is not just the numbers of illegal crossings alone; drugs too, especially fentanyl, are also pouring in. And among the illegal crossers, there are also criminals and terrorists in increasing numbers. Finally, there is the cost American taxpayers must bear: at least $151 billion according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Yet bad as these are viscerally, there is another even more fundamentally (and constitutionally) galling issue. Current Washington negotiations are really about getting President Biden to simply do his job. America has been reduced to the point of having to haggle with its president over something he is supposed to be doing in the first place: Protect the border.

There is a direct line from Democrats’ policies to America’s current illegal immigration crisis.  This line started with so-called “sanctuary cities.” According to World Population Review, these cities feature laws that “obstruct immigration enforcement and people from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)” and “refuse to or prohibit agencies from complying with ICE detainers, deny ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens” and use “other methods to prevent ICE personnel from carrying out their duties.”  

The movement began in the 1980s, with San Francisco’s 1989  “City and County of Refuge” resolution being considered a milestone. As of 2018, more than 560 jurisdictions were considered to be sanctuaries. On a December 2023 Center for Immigration Studies list, the cities and counties on it were overwhelmingly blue. 

Obviously, such “sanctuary” actions are an incentive to illegal immigration. However, there was always a deterrent that limited the impact of these sanctuary offers: illegal immigrants had to reach them first. Effectively, these jurisdictions were writing checks that they would never (or rarely) have to cash. That is until Biden took office.

As soon as the Biden-Harris administration was sworn in, it took numerous actions that reduced the deterrent to crossing America’s southern border illegally: halting border wall construction, suspending new enrollments in the “Remain in Mexico” program, ending the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with several Central America nations and more. The administration’s message was as clear as a welcome mat. 

With incentives long since in place and the deterrent long gone, illegal immigration responded as anyone but liberals would have expected. 

According to the Migration Policy Institute, since Biden took office, America’s southern border has had a record of at least 6.3 million migrant encounters, with 2.4 million allowed into the country. And these are just the known encounters: There is no way of counting all those who have evaded contact with U.S. officials.

Together, Democrats have provided the incentive at local levels by creating hundreds of sanctuary cities and at the federal level by removing the deterrence of enforcing border security.  The result has been virtue-signaling run amok. What once were the equivalent of meaningless yard signs are now signals with consequences for the cities — and even more for their residents, who must bear the cost of their elected officials’ public preening. 

America is seeing played out nationwide what Democrats’ Defund the Police movements have brought about in select cities: Drop enforcement and the activity that was being deterred increases. Go figure. And go fund — cities went from talk of defunding the police to refunding them when liberal rhetoric’s consequences started piling up. 

Back to the border, it is clear Democrats will not take action — at either the local or the federal levels — beyond the actions they have already taken, and which have created America’s illegal immigration crisis. They will not because they are beholden to extreme leftist elitists to whom these actions are not a revelation but a validation of their open border principles. So, Democrats’ only hope is for someone else to take the steps they could but refuse to take.

Yet just when America thought the reality of the Democrats’ fiasco couldn’t get worse, the Biden administration took Texas to task (court, actually) for the audacity of trying to do what the administration won’t: Defend the border. Thus, the administration continues to break new ground: Taking itself from incompetent to anti-competent, from a sin of omission to a sin of commission. 

Perhaps the recently proposed Senate bill will save Biden, his administration and his party from themselves. It will take time for the bill to be studied, to wind its way through the legislative process and for amendments, since the House was not part of the negotiations.  

Despite all these things, none of these should take away from the fundamental travesty: All of it is the result of being forced to negotiate with a president over him doing his job.

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.