Former President Joe Biden’s administration proved so catastrophic that those associated with it remain covered in its stench.
Thus, many have tried to clear the air by distancing themselves from the former president. We should take their words with a grain of salt.
For instance, according to a report Sunday in The New York Times, Biden and his senior officials, motivated primarily by politics, ignored repeated warnings that a migrant crisis could develop at the U.S. southern border and then spin out of control.
Christopher Flavelle, the story’s author, interviewed dozens of former Biden administration officials tasked with immigration and border policy.
From those interviews, there emerged a picture of a presidency with a politically driven agenda that overrode the counsel of some of its own advisers.
After the election, Flavelle reported, Biden’s “positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis …”
“They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.”
The goal, it seems, was undoing the work of President Donald Trump.
In 2019, for instance, Trump instituted the Remain in Mexico program. As the title suggests, that program required asylum seekers to stay in Mexico until their hearing in U.S. immigration court.
Alas, Biden “resisted anything that looked like Mr. Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy,” The New York Times reported.
Indeed, Cecilia Muñoz, a member of the Biden transition team, described the administration as “a little too sensitive to criticisms from the left.”
Likewise, in 2022 Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began busing migrants to northern “sanctuary” cities. Deborah Fleischaker, then the assistant director for policy at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saw this as a turning point in Democrats losing the immigration debate, according to the report.
“I don’t think we ever recovered,” Fleischaker said.
Scott Shuchart, an ICE senior adviser beginning in 2022, saw the problem in broader terms.
The Biden administration, Shuchart said, “had no strategy, because they had no goal.”
“All they had was wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about,” he added.
On the whole, the report struck a critical tone in its analysis of the former president’s immigration disaster.
“Why Mr. Biden waited so long to effectively seal the border has become one of the defining questions of his presidency,” the article noted.
Nonetheless, to focus now on Biden and his senior officials seems dubious for two reasons.
First, we have already seen a slew of former officials and enablers in the establishment media attempt to evade their own responsibility for, and connections to, the Biden administration. Notable culprits include former Vice President Kamala Harris, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Sunday’s New York Times report reads like one more example.
Second, Democrats in 2025 remain ferocious in their commitment to open borders. With the exception of Christians in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, ICE agents under President Trump have endured the most intense eruptions of Democrats’ demonic wrath.
Almost a full year after Biden’s departure from office, Democrats remain a party apparently committed to making it impossible to enforce the country’s immigration laws.
Thus, color us skeptical that Biden and only a few of his senior officials are responsible for the Democrats’ myriad problems on illegal immigration.
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