A former chief of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has warned that a potential Joe Biden victory in the 2020 November presidential elections would result in a crippling outcome for the US-Mexico border.
In an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Tom Homan, acting director of ICE between January 2017 and June 2018, insisted that if the ex-Vice President is elected and many of his campaign promises become reality, the southern border of the country will be once again steeped in “chaos”, with drug smuggling rife and instances of rapes and deaths among migrants soaring.
“It’s going to be chaos,” predicted the longtime federal immigration official.
Concerns About a Biden Presidency
The ex-ICE chief offered a rundown of Joe Biden’s campaign pledges to support his stance.
He emphasized that Biden’s immigration agenda, unveiled in December 2019, contained proposals for dismantling the Remain in Mexico program, a reinstatement of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the abolition of for-profit prisons.
Some two months later, Biden caved to pressure from the progressive bloc of the Democratic Party, says Homan, to add to the agenda a moratorium on all deportations during his first 100 days in office, with only convicted felons an exception.
Deploring the possible massive rollback of President Donald Trump’s achievements, Homan argues that rhetoric of this nature from a potential President would inevitably result in more illegal immigration into the US.
The measures touted by Biden would fill the coffers of drug cartels with more money made from smuggling migrants, while greater numbers of children would die while attempting to cross the border, warns the ex-ICE chief, insisting that the southern border would once again slip out of the federal government control.
“When you say we shouldn’t be removing illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, you’re inviting every illegal alien into our country because they know there are no consequences to entering the country illegally anymore so long as they don’t get arrested for a felony,” argues Homan.
The longtime federal immigration official likened Biden’s election pledges with the ex-Vice President’s past comments about Trump, in particular, about the rule of law.
“Here’s a guy who spent two years saying, “President Trump isn’t above the law, he needs to be held accountable.” President Trump isn’t above the law, but apparently [Biden] thinks illegal aliens are above the law,” Homan said.
Homan cited the Obama administration as a preview of what a Biden presidency would bring, reminding of the dramatic flow of migrant families that flocked to the US-Mexico border in 2013 after then-President Barack Obama unilaterally enacted DACA in 2012.
Cautioning against a likely repeat of the scenario under a Biden presidency, Homan, who was appointed executive associate director of ICE by Obama in 2013, said:
“If he becomes president, we lose the border.”
Trump ‘Brought Back Sanity’
As he warned of the aftermath of a possible Biden victory, the author of a book “Defend the Border and Save Lives: Solving Our Most Important Humanitarian and Security Crisis,” applauded the dramatic reduction in illegal immigration in the past months under the Trump administration.
Emphasizing that the positive results stemmed from actions taken by the president, Homan cited data as showing illegal immigration had dropped 80 per cent under the Trump administration.
As he cited a Doctors Without Borders report that revealed 30 percent of migrant women were raped while heading to the US, the former Border Patrol agent posed a rhetorical question:
“For those who hate Trump, they need to think about this — how many women did not get raped because of what the president has done?... How many children didn’t die because of what the president has done? How many immigrants didn’t die because of what the president has done? How many millions of dollars did the criminal cartels not make because of what the president has done?”
Insisting that Donald Trump had “bought sanity back to our legal system”, the former ICE chief voiced his fears that if Trump loses, much of the progress achieved under his tenure would be undone.
“Every American should be afraid of what’s going to happen to our border if Joe Biden becomes president."
Trump's Signature Wall
A hallmark promise of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was to crack down on illegal immigration to the US, as he deplored the crisis over crime caused by immigrant gangs, drug smuggling and human trafficking of would-be migrants.
Trump has consistently pursued a hardline approach to immigration, both legal and illegal, since coming to the office.
The pledge to deal with the issue materialized into his signature project to erect a substantial wall on the United States–Mexico border and to force Mexico to pay for it – something that country has consistently refused to do.
The battle over border wall funding has raged since Trump’s first days in office, with the President even shutting down part of the government for 35 days in December 2018 after he refused to sign a bipartisan spending bill to fund the government in 2019 until Congress compromised.
The Trump administration has built over 160km (100 miles) of border wall, according to US Customs and Border Protection statistics, with a pledge to erect at least 640km (400 miles) of the structure by November 2020, ahead of the presidential elections.
