Posted on Friday, January 17, 2025

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by Shane Harris

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President-elect Donald Trump will take office just days from now, bringing with him the promise to finally restore order at the U.S.-Mexico border and end the worst illegal immigration crisis in American history. But it’s not soon enough to prevent more bad news in the waning hours of Biden’s presidency.

This week, for the final time before Biden leaves office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released monthly data on border crossings, reporting 96,048 illegal crossings in December of last year. In total for 2024, CBP reported 1.6 million encounters along the Southwest border. This was apparently a drastic improvement from the 2.5 million encounters in 2023.

But as is seemingly always the case with the Biden administration, this “good news” masks a far less rosy reality. In addition to those 96,048 illegal crossers, CBP also reported that the administration allowed nearly 1.5 million migrants to enter the country “legally” through the CBP One app and migrant flights last month – programs rife with controversy that Trump has promised to cancel on day one.

As AMAC Newsline reported last September, the Biden administration went all out to sell “success” on the border by re-categorizing millions of migrants from “illegal” to “legal” status. Specifically, since the official statistics for illegal border crossings only include individuals apprehended “between points of entry,” the Biden administration has done everything it can to funnel migrants to points of entry, promising free access into the United States.

From there, millions of migrants have been admitted either through rampant abuse of the president’s parole authority or blatant corruption in the asylum system via programs like the CBP One app. Those admitted under dubious asylum claims are given court dates, sometimes as far as 10 years in the future.

An army of left-wing NGOs then funnels untold numbers of migrants throughout the country, even paying for flights to sanctuary cities. Airports and even schools have been overrun with the flood of new arrivals, wreaking havoc on government services and disadvantaging taxpaying American citizens.

This coordinated attempt at what is in effect extralegal mass amnesty was the final act of Biden’s border catastrophe. Not only did a sitting President of the United States do nothing to stop millions of unknown individuals from flooding into the country, he openly invited them in and then granted them pseudo-legal status.

The true scope of the border invasion that has occurred over the last four years will likely never be fully known. The best estimates put the total number of illegal crossings somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 million. At least two million of those are “gotaways,” or individuals who escaped into the interior of the country completely undetected.

Just before the election, the country also learned the staggering number of criminal illegal aliens who now reside in the United States thanks to Joe Biden. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, there are currently at least 425,000 convicted criminals living in the United States illegally. That figure includes 16,000 individuals convicted of sexual assault, 57,000 convicted of drug crimes, and 13,000 convicted of murder.

Trump has promised to start “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” on day one of his second term. He has specifically said he plans to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to begin the removal of illegals and “dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.”

That’s welcome news for the American people, but it comes tragically too late for families who have seen first-hand the violence and destruction wrought by Biden’s border invasion. The senseless killing of nursing student Laken Riley by a twice-arrested illegal alien became a flashpoint in last year’s election, but Riley’s family was hardly the only one to suffer the consequences of Biden’s open border.

In another high-profile case, criminal gangs of illegal aliens reportedly took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. The street gang Tren de Aragua has meanwhile taken advantage of the open border and blazed a path of violence across the country, terrorizing and victimizing American citizens.

The political backlash to this shocking breakdown in law and order was swift and decisive. 72 percent of voters said immigration was either extremely or very important to them in last year’s election, and there is no doubt that this played a significant role in sinking Biden “border czar” Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House.

Of all the harm that the Biden administration has done to the country, its shameful legacy on the border is perhaps the most damaging of all. While Americans can expect major changes when Trump takes the oath of office again, families who have lost loved ones to criminal illegal aliens will never get them back. Young people forced to endure the horrors of human trafficking will never regain their innocence. Families and communities devastated by fentanyl and other deadly drugs will never fully recover what was lost.

Remembering this somber reality makes Trump’s mission all the more urgent. Americans should never again have to read another monthly report detailing a failure on the part of their government to keep them safe and perform the most basic duties of a sovereign nation to protect and secure its borders.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.