America’s Border Crisis Demands Accountability, Enforcement, and a Return to Sovereignty
The Biden-Era Border Surge Became a Crisis of Trust - But the Strongest Arguments Require Careful Distinctions
For millions of Americans, the border debate during the Biden years stopped being a narrow argument about immigration policy.
It became a test of whether the federal government could control entry into the country, enforce laws consistently and maintain public confidence in the immigration system.
The scale of the surge explains why that concern became so politically powerful.
From fiscal years 2021 through 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported an average of about 2.2 million encounters at the southwest border each year. During the four fiscal years before that period, the average was about 600,000.
Those numbers do not represent 2.2 million unique people every year, and they include encounters both at and between official ports of entry.
But they still document a dramatic increase in the volume the border system was being asked to process.
Critics of President Joe Biden argue that the administration's asylum, parole and enforcement policies encouraged more migrants to attempt entry and reduced the consequences of arriving without authorization.
That is a political argument with a factual foundation, but it is not the entire explanation for the surge.
The Government Accountability Office has also pointed to broader regional pressures. By 2023, roughly 20 million people in the Western Hemisphere had been displaced by violence, persecution and other humanitarian crises, conditions that contributed to rising migration toward the United States.
Beginning in 2021, CBP also expanded the use of humanitarian parole to help manage the growing number of noncitizens arriving at and between southwest border ports of entry.
That combination - unusually high migration pressure and policy choices about how arriving migrants were processed, released and monitored - is a more defensible description of what happened than attributing every crossing to a single cause.
The consequences were not confined to the border states.
As migrants moved to cities and communities around the country, local governments faced new demands for schools, shelter, transportation, policing and other public services.
Here, the evidence supports a substantial part of the criticism.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the immigration surge that began in 2021 directly increased state and local spending by $19.3 billion in 2023 while generating $10.1 billion in state and local tax revenue.
That produced a direct net state and local cost of about $9.2 billion for the year.
More than half of the added spending was associated with elementary and secondary education, shelter and related services, and border security.
CBO also estimated that additional instructional and support services for recent immigrants with lower English proficiency cost state and local governments about $1.2 billion in 2023.
Those figures help explain why communities that experienced rapid population increases often described the issue in practical rather than ideological terms.
A school district still needs teachers and classroom space. A shelter system still needs beds. A city still has to budget for emergency services.
But the economic argument becomes less certain when it moves from local fiscal pressure to the claim that immigration simply makes Americans poorer.
CBO's analysis found competing effects.
The surge expanded the labor force and initially slowed average compensation growth slightly, in part because many recent arrivals entered lower-paying sectors and had lower average education and earnings.
At the same time, CBO projected that the larger workforce would increase economic output, raise federal tax revenue and reduce federal deficits over the following decade.
For workers already in the United States, CBO projected that some groups could experience small short-term wage effects, while higher productivity would modestly improve wage growth after 2026.
So working-class concerns about labor competition should not be dismissed, but neither should they be presented as proof that every increase in immigration produces a broad, permanent reduction in American wages.
The fentanyl argument requires an equally important distinction.
Mexican cartels are central to the illicit fentanyl trade, and the southwest border is a critical trafficking corridor.
The drug has devastated families across the United States, and disrupting the organizations that manufacture, transport and distribute it is unquestionably a major border-security and law-enforcement challenge.
But fentanyl trafficking is not the same phenomenon as migrants illegally crossing between ports of entry.
CBP says more than 90 percent of the fentanyl it interdicts is stopped at official ports of entry, where traffickers commonly conceal drugs in cars, trucks and commercial cargo.
That does not make border security irrelevant to the fentanyl crisis.
It changes what effective border security requires.
More agents between ports can address unlawful crossings and human smuggling. Better scanners, inspections, intelligence and investigations at ports of entry are especially important for stopping fentanyl.
Treating those missions as interchangeable makes the political argument simpler, but the operational problem harder to understand.
Public safety has produced another difficult part of the debate.
It is inaccurate to treat immigrants as a whole as violent criminals, and the fact that a person entered unlawfully does not establish that the person poses a violent threat.
The stronger public-safety argument is narrower.
When a removable noncitizen is arrested or convicted for a serious offense, voters can reasonably ask whether federal and local authorities are cooperating effectively and whether existing law permits that person to be removed.
That is where sanctuary policies become relevant.
ICE immigration detainers are requests asking another law-enforcement agency to notify ICE about a person's release and, in appropriate cases, maintain custody long enough for ICE to assume custody.
Some state and local policies restrict the circumstances in which agencies will honor those requests or share release information.
Critics argue that those limits can make immigration enforcement more difficult and can leave removable offenders in the community after local criminal custody ends.
Supporters of sanctuary policies argue that local police should not be turned into general immigration agents and that cooperation must comply with constitutional, statutory and local legal limits.
Individual cases in which a released offender later commits another serious crime can understandably produce anger.
They can justify scrutiny of the decision in that case. They do not, by themselves, establish that immigrants generally are more dangerous than the native-born population.
The most inflammatory argument in the border debate goes further still.
Some critics have described the Biden administration's border policies as "treason."
That is not a sound legal description of policy decisions merely because critics believe those decisions were reckless or harmful.
The Constitution defines treason narrowly: levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies and giving them aid and comfort. The Constitution also imposes unusually demanding proof requirements for a treason conviction.
A disputed immigration policy, weak enforcement or even a deliberate decision to use executive discretion does not automatically fit that definition.
Political accountability does not depend on stretching the word "treason."
Congress can investigate. Courts can review executive actions. Inspectors general and watchdog agencies can identify failures. Voters can remove elected officials. A later administration can change lawful policies.
Those are not weak remedies. They are the normal constitutional mechanisms for holding government accountable.
The broader border argument is strongest when it stays within those lines.
A sovereign country has a legitimate interest in controlling its borders, determining who may enter and ensuring that people who are ordered removed are actually subject to an enforceable process.
That principle is compatible with supporting legal immigration, asylum for people who qualify under the law and an immigration system that allows newcomers to work, build families and eventually become citizens when the law provides a path.
The real policy dispute is over how those goals should be balanced when the system is under extraordinary pressure.
How quickly should asylum claims be decided?
When should migrants be detained, paroled or released while cases are pending?
How should Congress expand court capacity and legal pathways while preserving consequences for unlawful entry?
How much immigration-enforcement responsibility should be shared with state and local authorities?
And how should the government separate the fight against cartels and fentanyl trafficking from the very different task of processing families, workers and asylum seekers?
Those questions are harder than a slogan about an "open border" or a blanket accusation that every enforcement concern is anti-immigrant.
The Biden-era surge settled one issue.
The southwest border experienced an extraordinary increase in encounters, and the resulting pressure imposed measurable costs and operational burdens on governments and communities.
What it did not settle is every claim made in response to that crisis.
The evidence does not support treating fentanyl smuggling and illegal migration as the same problem. It does not support reducing immigration's economic effects to a single claim about wages. And it does not turn controversial border policy into constitutional treason.
None of those distinctions requires minimizing the failure of government when laws are not enforced effectively or when an overwhelmed system loses public confidence.
They make the case for reform stronger because they focus accountability on failures that can actually be demonstrated.
A secure border, a functioning legal immigration system and meaningful accountability are not extreme goals.
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The harder task is designing policies that achieve them without confusing political anger with evidence.
That is where the border debate ultimately returns: not simply to immigration, but to whether citizens can trust the government to enforce the law competently, distinguish one threat from another and tell the public clearly what the evidence does - and does not - show.
