Sam Graves: There's a crisis on our southern border

There is a crisis at the border and President Biden has escalated it by halting deportations of illegal immigrants, trying to push unfair amnesty legislation, and unlawfully freezing border wall funding authorized by Congress.

In February, more than 100,000 individuals were encountered trying to illegally cross the southern border. That’s a 173 percent increase from February 2020. We haven’t seen illegal immigration numbers like this in decades. 

While Customs and Border Protection agents are overwhelmed by the flood of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country, drug smugglers are taking advantage of the crisis.

Seizures of Fentanyl at the border are up more than 360 percent from this same time last year. Agents have seized nearly 5,000 pounds of the deadly drug in the first five months of Fiscal Year 2021, compared to just 4,700 pounds in all Fiscal Year 2020. It isn’t just drug smugglers that are having a field day though, human traffickers are taking advantage of the crisis as well.

The number of unaccompanied minor children encountered at the border has grown to 29,792 this Fiscal Year. There’s little doubt in my mind that a lot of that has to do with the Biden Administration’s promises of amnesty and use of “catch and release” tactics. 

We’ve seen this before; these policies give human traffickers huge incentives to abduct and purchase minor children to use in their illegal enterprise—putting thousands of children at risk.

This isn’t just a humanitarian and immigration problem that President Biden’s open border policies have caused though—it’s a national security crisis. Not all the illegal immigrants detained at the border come from Mexico, Central America, and South America. 

Some hail from countries like Iran and Yemen, having flown or sailed halfway around the world to take advantage of the crisis. Even suspected terrorists have been detained trying to cross our southern border. The scary part is that this is what we know from the individuals we’ve caught—it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of who has come into this country illegally and undetected.

President Biden and his administration can call this whatever they want, but the facts don’t lie. There is a crisis at the southern border. Instead of pushing through more amnesty bills and encouraging more illegal immigration, the President and his allies in Congress need to start working on real solutions to end this crisis.

A good start would be for the President to end his unlawful freeze on border wall construction. Congress appropriated that money to build the wall and the President has no authority to halt construction unilaterally. More importantly, it would go a long ways towards finally securing our border.