Joe Biden's history on illegal immigration and how he morphed from a border hawk to an open-borders president. We examine Joe Biden s history on Illegal immigration and the reasons why he veered from a hard line on the issue to a soft touch on it, and how it led to his eventual embrace of open borders and immigration reform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The immigration law he supported in 1996 laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today, and was supported by Joe Biden, a key figure in the immigration reform efforts of Bill Clinton's administration, which led to the creation of the Secure Southern Border Act of 1996, which set the stage for the border patrol agency known as the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is responsible for securing our southern border, and is tasked with catching and deporting illegal immigrants who cross the southern border into the United States. But as we know, Joe Biden has long been a proponent of a much more lax immigration policy, and has long supported a bill that made it easier for illegal immigrants to re-enter the country. the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, or IRA-IRA, which made it much easier for immigrants convicted of crimes to be deported. The bill was passed in 1996, but it was retroactive, making deportation much more difficult for immigrants who had been in the US for at least 7 years to get their cases heard by a judge before they got a chance to apply for legal status. The legislation also made it harder for them to argue their cases in court, making it harder to get a fair chance to stay in the country they had been waiting for their day in the first place they applied for a green card. The result was a lot easier to be deporting their case in the U.S., and much less likely to have their case heard in court and a chance at a fair hearing in a court of review. This is the story of an immigrant who has been here before the courts. The immigration reform bill that was passed by President Bill Clinton in the early 90s, and it s a story about a man who was a bellwether for years, and now has the right to apply their case for their case to be heard in a fair and just as they got their day to be considered a fair shot at the American justice system. Ben Shapiro's The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. It s time to stand up against Big Tech. Protect your data. Protect Your Data.
00:00:25.000Hundreds of thousands of people are crossing our southern border every single month.
00:00:28.000The vast majority of them will end up basically being released into the United States after a certain period of time.
00:00:34.000Because when they come to the border, then we give them a piece of paper that says that you have to have your asylum claim adjudicated, at which point they are released into the interior.
00:00:41.000Some come back for their first appointment.
00:00:43.000Many never come back for their second appointment.
00:00:45.000Hundreds of thousands of people every month, and that's not including people who just entered the border and were caught by Border Patrol in the first place.
00:00:53.000The Biden administration continues to claim through gritted teeth that everything is fine at the border.
00:00:57.000Everyone knows things are not fine at the border, and this has very serious consequences for the United States, not only in terms of our fiscal future, in terms of crime, in terms of electoral demographics, because eventually, you imagine, Democrats will attempt to amnesty a lot of these people who have violated the law.
00:01:12.000Now, as I've always said, I don't blame people for attempting to get into the United States.
00:01:16.000This is the greatest country on the face of the planet.
00:01:18.000Why wouldn't you try to get in if you could?
00:01:20.000The real question is whether the United States is a sovereign country that controls its own border.
00:01:24.000The Democrats apparently have decided they no longer wish for the United States to be a sovereign country that controls its own border.
00:01:30.000Because to understand where Joe Biden is on this issue, you have to understand where Joe Biden has been.
00:01:34.000Joe Biden, as always, is a bellwether inside the Democratic Party.
00:01:40.000The opinions he does have of his own tend to be very, very wrong, but he just follows the base of the Democratic Party wherever it leads, which is why during the Democratic primaries in 2020, he was slightly more moderate than Bernie Sanders, but then he immediately swiveled and became more left-wing the minute that he gained power, because the Democratic base wanted him to be more left-wing.
00:01:58.000Joe Biden is not a sentient being on his own.
00:02:00.000He is animated by the desires of the of the median voter inside the Democratic Party.
00:02:06.000And this is why, if you look at his evolution on illegal immigration, it's extraordinarily clear how the Democratic Party has morphed.
00:02:12.000So, for example, in 1996, Joe Biden is one of the biggest backers of a bill that is now remembered by Democrats as something horrible, right? It's sort of like Joe Biden on crime. In 1994, Joe Biden supported this crime bill, which was extraordinarily effective in lowering crime across the United States. Then by 2020, he had to run against the crime bill because the Democratic Party had decided that police were bad. Well, same thing happened with illegal immigration. In 1996, according to Vox.com, not a right-wing source, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that overhauled
00:02:41.000immigration enforcement in the United States and laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today.
00:02:46.000The 1996 immigration bill continues to control a lot of our immigration law.
00:03:30.000Immigrants who were convicted of crimes weren't the only ones stripped of the ability to argue their case before a judge, before getting deported.
00:03:35.000Anybody apprehended within 100 miles of the border could be sent before a judge.
00:03:40.000And IRA required the government to hold more immigrants in detention before deporting them, making it harder for them to get lawyers in the first place.
00:03:47.000It also made it a lot harder for unauthorized immigrants to get legal.
00:03:51.000Before 1996, immigrants who had been in the United States for at least 7 years could get legal status as long as they showed it would cause them extreme hardship to get deported.
00:04:24.000The number of Mexicans deported from the United States rose from somewhere around 25,000 in 1994-1995 to 150,000 by 1998-1999 because of this particular law.
00:04:37.000This was supported by Joe Biden, who, as I say, used to be a border hawk.
00:04:42.000The simple fact that Joe Biden used to be a border hawk is, again, indicative of how far left the Democratic Party overall has moved.
00:04:51.000And he stayed a border hawk all the way up until about 2006.
00:04:53.000In 2006, here's Joe Biden explaining that it was important.
00:04:56.000He did a full immigration speech in which Joe Biden said, we needed to tighten the border with fences.
00:05:31.000People are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts from methamphetamines to cocaine to heroin.
00:05:43.000It's all coming up through corrupt Mexico.
00:06:56.000Okay, so that was Joe Biden up until about 2008.
00:06:59.000Then he became the vice presidential candidate under Barack Obama, and he immediately swiveled.
00:07:03.000So for the first couple of years, Barack Obama didn't seem too loose on the border then.
00:07:08.000In 2012, you started to see a major upswing in illegal immigration brought on by the fact that Joe Biden and Barack Obama decided that if you were a dreamer, meaning you were somebody who was brought here as a minor, then you would not be deported.
00:07:20.000There would be deferred action for childhood arrivals.
00:07:22.000And in fact, the entire Obama administration, which is a very radical administration, was predicated on the idea that there should not be deportations of illegal immigrants.
00:07:30.000Remember, in 2012, Barack Obama ran on the notion that Mitt Romney was too harsh on immigration.
00:07:37.000Because Mitt Romney's proposal was that a lot of people would quote-unquote self-support if you didn't give them benefits.
00:07:42.000So by 2015, Joe Biden and Barack Obama were meeting with DREAMers.
00:07:46.000And suddenly, Barack Obama and Joe Bi- again, because Barack Obama was the center of the Democratic Party, he was the lodestar around which the Democratic Party moved, Joe Biden swiveled from border hawk to border dove.
00:07:56.000Here is Joe Biden hanging out with Barack Obama in 2015 with the DREAMers.
00:08:00.000My parents, they have two small businesses in Southern California.
00:08:09.000My mom is actually the vice president of the Women's Club at our park.
00:08:13.000All we want to have is an opportunity to fully give back to this country.
00:08:17.000You guys remind us why not only this issue is so important, but you remind me of What's best about this country and why we need to fight for values that make this a special place.
00:08:37.000And Joe Biden sitting there nodding along to something that presumably he would have disagreed with about 10 years before.
00:08:45.000It's also important to recognize here why Obama did this in 2012.
00:08:48.000It was June 2012 when Obama announced DACA.
00:08:50.000The reason he did it is because he was trying to cobble together the intersectional coalition and he was trying to hand out goodies to as many intersectional groups as he thought he could identify.
00:08:58.000Now, it turns out Hispanics are not able to be pandered to this way.
00:09:02.000The notion that Hispanics are widely in favor of illegal immigration is just not true.
00:09:05.000By polling data, Hispanics don't particularly like illegal immigration.
00:09:09.000But the Joe Biden who represents the center of the Democratic Party continues to move to the left.
00:09:15.000By the time you hit 2018, he's ripping Donald Trump's border policy as one of the darkest moments in American history.
00:09:20.000One of the worst things happening in America, right?
00:09:22.000This is the kids in cages era of American political media.
00:09:25.000Remember that because of a consent decree that was undertaken during the Obama era, You could no longer hold parents and children together in detention.
00:09:33.000And so what this meant is that you had to separate the parents from the kids and you had to keep the kids in certain facilities if you couldn't give them to family members and all the rest of this.
00:09:44.000And suddenly this became Donald Trump's fault because he said, I'm not just going to release the parents with the kids into the interior of the United States.
00:09:49.000Here was Joe Biden, who used to say, we need a 700 mile fence.
00:09:53.000We need to arrest employers who hire illegal immigrants.
00:09:56.000There's drugs flowing up through the border.
00:09:58.000Now saying that it's one of the worst things in human history that Donald Trump is harsh on the border.
00:10:03.000This administration's policy that literally ripped babies from the arms of their mothers and fathers is one of the darkest moments in our history.
00:10:13.000Our reputation is being tarnished around the world.
00:10:18.000Not only is it a national shame, it tarnishes the very idea of America.
00:10:27.000It tarnishes the idea of America, by the way.
00:10:28.000I should note at this point, that was 2018.
00:10:30.000July 17th, 2022, as of that date, there were 443 kids without parents who came across the border.
00:10:37.000There were over 11,600 children who were being held by the feds.
00:10:41.000The United States was expecting up to 161,000 single minors to cross the border in 2022.
00:10:46.000In 2014, which was a major immigration crisis in the United States, that number was 68,000.
00:10:54.000Today, it's almost triple that under Joe Biden.
00:10:59.000So, important to recognize Joe Biden's massive evolution on this issue.
00:11:03.000And so, all of the policies that he has undertaken are geared toward broader illegal immigration now.
00:11:09.000Because the Democratic Party has basically decided that the border must never be enforced for political reasons.
00:11:14.000Because ideologically speaking, borders are bad.
00:11:17.000Ideologically speaking, borders are exclusive.
00:11:19.000Ideologically speaking, everyone who wants to get in should be able to get in.
00:11:22.000Particularly, particularly, if a lot of those people tend to hold the same sort of I mean, why not?
00:11:32.000I'm searching for another explanation as to why they're so soft on the border.
00:11:43.000So, what is the political reason for doing this other than there must be some sort of political or ideological gain?
00:11:50.000So, to push forward, on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration, the administration released a proposed bill That would include a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people and a series of executive actions, among them an immediate stop to construction of fencing along the southern border.
00:12:05.000Big transition from 2006 Joe Biden, I support fencing on the southern border to stop the construction that's already underway on the border because it's got a big T on it for Trump.
00:12:15.000According to the LA Times, the incoming administration described its package as a common sense approach to modernizing and restoring humanity to the immigration system after four years of President Trump's systematic crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration.
00:12:28.000Citizenship Act, which Biden sent to Capitol Hill on Inauguration Day, offered an eight-year roadmap to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States without legal status.
00:12:37.000Now, the big problem, of course, is that he didn't secure the border before pushing any of this.
00:12:41.000So, if you push a giant amnesty, and at the same time you say, we're not going to close the border, what do you think?
00:12:47.000That's a free donut sign in a shop window.
00:12:50.000If approved, it would prioritize three categories of people to immediately receive green cards.
00:12:54.000Farm workers, people with temporary protected status, and DACA, DREAMers.
00:13:00.000In Washington, California and other states with vast immigrant labor populations, the new bill could dramatically increase job security and significantly raise living standards, according to the LA Times.
00:13:09.000So, again, this was pushed immediately by Joe Biden, like, first day that he entered office.
00:13:14.000We'll get to more of Joe Biden's terrible border policy in just one second.
00:14:02.000It's well worth 119 bucks to secure your family's future.
00:14:05.000Without a will, you may as well wrap up all your money and assets and hand them over to the state because that's who's going to adjudicate where all that stuff goes after you die.
00:14:11.000No matter where you're at in your life, you need to have a will in place.
00:14:19.000So Joe Biden has pursued just a slate, a bevy of terrible policies on immigration.
00:14:25.000According to the New York Post, this is circa February 2021, the Biden administration has revived the so-called catch-and-release system when it comes to illegal immigrants at the southern border.
00:14:35.000President Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order revoking former President Trump's ending of a controversial practice which allows undocumented migrants to remain in the U.S.
00:14:44.000Customs and Border Protection said the shift in policy was the result of three issues, the influx of migrants and children, Mexico's refusal to take in families with kids under 12, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:14:53.000The executive order Only permits Border Patrol to hold an undocumented illegal alien crossing the border up to 72 hours.
00:15:00.000So, right away he went back to catch and release.
00:15:03.000According to CBP Public Affairs Officer Rod Keyes, CBP has seen a steady increase in border encounters since April 2020, which, aggravated by COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing guidelines, has caused some facilities to reach maximum safe holding capacity.
00:15:18.000Per longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions aren't possible, some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a notice to appear, and released into the U.S.
00:15:26.000So catch and release was immediately put back in place by Joe Biden, like right away upon taking office.
00:15:33.000And unsurprisingly, the border crisis began to mount.
00:15:36.000By August of 2021, CBP had stopped more than 210,000 migrants in July of 2021.
00:15:43.000That was the biggest monthly number in more than 20 years.
00:15:47.000Already, by halfway through the year, more than 1.3 million migrants had been captured at the border, twice the population of the city of Boston, according to Con Carroll over at the Washington Examiner.
00:15:58.000CBP agents were releasing migrants in the United States without testing them for COVID.
00:16:02.000They were swamping border communities.
00:16:05.000They were being busted throughout the United States.
00:16:09.000Again, all of this was promoted by the Biden administration.
00:16:16.000In fall of 2013, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso noticed the number of unaccompanied kids apprehended while crossing the southern border had doubled over the previous three years.
00:16:26.000The researchers visited CBP facilities across the Southwest.
00:16:29.000They interviewed officials who worked with migrant children.
00:16:31.000What the researchers found alarmed them.
00:16:32.000They warned DHS officials if policies did not change, the number of migrants apprehended at the border was likely to double, leaving CBP without the capacity to house and process them.
00:16:41.000The federal government ignored the report.
00:16:42.000So what did researchers find that led them to predict the 2014 border crisis?
00:16:47.000Apparently, it was just border policy.
00:16:49.000In 2014, both Border Patrol and ICE officers agreed the lack of deterrence for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border had impacted the rate at which they were apprehending unaccompanied children.
00:16:59.000In other words, migrants learned that if they got caught by U.S.
00:17:01.000officials at the southern border, they wouldn't be punished, and U.S.
00:17:04.000officials would help them complete their journey.
00:17:07.000And so, this has been exacerbated under Joe Biden.
00:17:13.000Biden campaigned on a promise to open the country's borders.
00:17:17.000Asked by Univision's Jorge Ramos, why should Latinos trust you?
00:17:20.000Biden said during the campaign, quote, if you want to flee and you are fleeing oppression, you should come.
00:17:25.000So everybody who's coming is now claiming asylum, of course.
00:17:28.000The predictable result is a mass migration crisis.
00:17:34.000And to add insult to injury, Joe Biden has then condemned officers attempting to prevent vast illegal immigration into the United States.
00:17:41.000When border patrol officers tried to stop Haitian immigrants, a huge number of people who are crossing the border are not coming from Mexico, by the way.
00:17:48.000When Joe Biden saw CBP officers trying to stop people from crossing the Rio Grande or running away into the Rio Grande and manipulating their horses with the reins, the media proclaimed that they were whipping migrants.
00:18:00.000Joe Biden immediately came out and condemned the CBP officers.
00:18:03.000It was horrible what to see, as you saw.
00:18:05.000To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over, people being strapped.
00:18:34.000The Border Patrol agents weren't whipping the migrants at all.
00:18:36.000That didn't stop Biden from ripping the Border Patrol agents.
00:18:38.000Then you wonder why there's vast illegal immigration happening right now?
00:18:41.000Joe Biden has attempted to backfill that by keeping in place Title 42.
00:18:44.000Title 42 is, of course, a Trump-era policy that basically says that we can reject people at the border thanks to COVID-19.
00:18:52.000Biden, on the one hand, has been trying to please his base by saying he's going to get rid of Title 42.
00:18:55.000On the other hand, he knows the minute he gets rid of Title 42, hundreds of thousands more illegal immigrants are going to come into the United States.
00:19:01.000But the Biden administration policy is not changing.
00:19:03.000It's getting worse and it's getting worse.
00:19:05.000Andrew Arthur over at the Center for Immigration Studies points out a vast bevy of serious problems at the border.
00:19:12.000He says the Biden administration has a transparency problem when it comes to immigration.
00:19:16.000USCIS has just released a document showing what happens at the border.
00:19:21.000It shows the administration is not using expedited removal, a key tool designed explicitly to allow DHS to control illegal entries to address the calamity unfolding at the southern border.
00:19:32.000Apparently, they're just deciding not to expedite the removals.
00:19:36.000Instead, they're releasing people into the interior of the United States.
00:19:41.000Despite the popular characterization of all migrants who enter illegally at the southwest border and are released into the United States as asylum seekers, most are not, at least not at the time they were released.
00:19:49.000Few illegal immigrants who are placed into removal proceedings will have any other form of immigration relief.
00:19:54.000Most eventually will file asylum applications as a fallback.
00:19:58.000And so everybody's now filing asylum, and then they're being released into the interior of the United States.
00:20:04.000Even Joe Biden's own Secretary of Homeland Security is admitting that 1.4 million illegal immigrants have been processed at the border since January of 2021.
00:20:16.000District Court, which you submitted, the DHS has directly released at least 836,000 aliens into the United States since January 21st.
00:20:25.000Then you add the 207,000 unaccompanied alien children, UACs, and then your Border Patrol estimates somewhere from 200,000 to 400,000 gotaways.
00:20:35.000In other words, encounters that are not evaded apprehension.
00:21:34.000And yet, apparently it's okay with Joe Biden.
00:21:37.000A huge number, by the way, of those encounters involve people from countries other than Mexico, which shows that it's not just an immediate border problem.
00:21:43.000It's that everybody now realizes the border is wide open.
00:21:47.000The encounters are soaring in fiscal year 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Pew Research.
00:21:54.000That includes Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba.
00:22:00.000Migrant encounters increased across demographic groups in fiscal 2021.
00:22:04.000Single adults continue to be the large majority.
00:22:08.000So this is people who are coming here to set down anchors.
00:22:40.000According to the Daily Signal, under the Biden administration, deaths of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 increased by almost 300 from the prior year, and by 200 from the last non-pandemic year.
00:22:50.000According to the U.N., more border deaths have occurred in the first half of 2022 than for the entire calendar years of 2020, 2018, and 2017.
00:23:09.000In June of 2021, NBC News reported that they had seen a staggering 4,000% increase in El Paso, that sector of the border, in fentanyl seizures over the past three years.
00:23:22.000The busts are not at ports of entry where most smuggled drugs are typically found.
00:23:25.000They say that the rising amount of fentanyl is being found in the desert, transported by increasingly brazen smugglers who are exploiting stretched federal resources.
00:23:33.000A migrant crisis allows other people to sneak through.
00:23:36.000And as you can see, by the way, the stats are just extraordinary.
00:23:39.000The amount of fentanyl seized at the southern border has hit all-time highs under Joe Biden.
00:23:53.000According to factcheck.org, again, a left-wing source, Overall, about 13,021 pounds of fentanyl were seized in Joe Biden's first full 15 months in office, 70% more than the 7,677 pounds of fentanyl seized in Trump's last 15 months as president.
00:24:28.000So when you hear Joe Biden and teams suggest that illegal immigration is just an unhandleable problem or it's the Northern Triangle, no, it is your border policy, sir.
00:24:34.000And that has exacerbated an already underlying crisis on our southern border.
00:24:38.000Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
00:24:40.000We'll be back here with much, much more tomorrow.
00:24:43.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boren, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Sajevitz, Audio Mixer Mike Karamina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Christina, Production Coordinator Jessica Kranz.
00:25:08.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.