Not that reality actually means much, but here’s a little dose of it anyway:
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Donald Trump rolled out a new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris that showcased his well-known fondness for high-toned discourse: Her handling of immigration reveals her as not just weak, but also dumb.
The former president luridly claimed that Venezuelan gang members were “plotting to conduct ambush attacks” on American cops, then added: “All the while Harris and Biden sit in the White House and try to figure out who is dumber.” He proceeded to blame “Border Czar Harris” for a series of crimes by migrants, even though President Biden tasked her with addressing the root causes of Central American migration, while the Department of Homeland Security secures the border.
Unfortunately for Trump, unpublished DHS data shows that border encounters between ports of entry plummeted again to approximately 57,000 in July, according to an official familiar with the numbers. The data, which is preliminary until its official release in the coming days, was also leaked to CBS News and The New York Times. This is the fifth straight month of declining border crossings and the lowest monthly figure of the Biden administration. According to the Times, nine separate months during the Trump administration saw more border crossings than July under Biden did.
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts have noted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part. “Increased Mexican enforcement efforts have clearly played a big role in bringing the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border down in the past few months,” Selee told me.
This story is in TNR. But it should be on the front page of the NY Times. Just as people believe that the economy is terrible even though it has been roaring they also believe that the border is in crisis despite the fact that it is actually much improved — because they simply don’t hear about it.
Meanwhile, the US Government seems to be pretty good at stopping drugs from coming over the border:
Around 4 million fentanyl pills, weighing more than 1,000 pounds were seized in the largest fentanyl bust in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s history on July 1. A second seizure on July 12 resulted in another 270 pounds of meth being taken off the streets.
Combined, the two massive drug busts took millions of dollars out of the hands of drug smuggling organizations, according to a release. “This is an enormous amount of dangerous drugs that officers at the Port of Lukeville prevented from reaching communities throughout the United States,” said Guadalupe Ramierez, the Director of Field Operations at the Tucson office.
In the first incident, a 20-year-old from Arizona arrived at the port of entry with a customized 2011 pick-up truck carrying a trailer with a sport utility vehicle being towed on it. Officers noticed alterations to the frame of the trailer, which tipped them off to perform an additional inspection. The additional inspection revealed 234 packages concealed in the trailer frame that contained 4 million pills of fentanyl.
In the second seizure, officers discovered 270 pounds of meth transported similarly, in a pick-up truck towing a utility trailer.
In neither case were undocumented migrants carrying the drugs over the border in their backpacks.