America is paying a high price for Biden and Harris’ open border policies

The border czar has some explaining to do. But don’t count on a complicit corporate media asking Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris to answer questions about the chaos the Biden-Harris administration has caused with its deadly open border policy.

But Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, plans to hammer home the point. His office has detailed the “breadth and depth” of the devastation in a new 36-page white paper titled “America Invaded: How the Biden-Harris Border Crisis is Fundamentally Transforming the United States.” The Texas Republican and his constituents in the Lone Star State’s 21st Congressional District have been living with the damage for nearly four years, like so many other places around the country dealing with a tsunami of illegal immigrants brought into their backyards by the border.

“This document documents the scale and depth of the ongoing damage to our country — transformed from a strong nation built on the rule of law that welcomes immigrants in accordance with that law, to a lawless, dangerous, and unrecognizable collection of individuals with no common bond,” Roy said in a press release announcing the report’s release.

The numbers are staggering. According to the report, more than 8.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southwestern U.S. border since President Joe Biden and his No. 2 took office, roughly the population of Virginia. The Biden-Harris catch-and-release program has sent at least 5.6 million illegal aliens into the country’s interior, while some 1.9 million “escaped” aliens have eluded the attention of “distracted and exhausted” U.S. Border Patrol agents. In total, more than 7 million illegal aliens have flowed into the United States under the Biden administration’s watch.

‘Terrible plague’

Deadly fentanyl, horrific crimes and a mountain of dead bodies have accompanied wave after wave of illegal immigrants. The report estimates that fentanyl overdoses (poisonings) will claim the lives of 75,000 Americans in 2023 — “an average of more than 200 deaths per day.” The epidemic is being brought to you by Mexican drug cartels and deadly chemicals made in China and smuggled across the border.

“Almost everyone knows someone — a family member, a friend, a neighbor — who has been affected by the terrible scourge of opioid overdoses, especially fentanyl,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said after last year’s First Regional Family Summit on Fentanyl. “These deaths have torn apart families, schools, and communities, and we mourn the loss of so much life, talent, and goodness.” In Utah alone, there will be 541 drug overdose deaths in 2022, with opioids like fentanyl responsible for three-quarters of the deaths, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

There are thousands more victims of countless crimes, including some of the most horrific murders and attacks ever recorded, Roy’s report points out. Think of the families of Laken Riley, Kayla Hamilton, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was allegedly lured under a bridge, assaulted for two hours and strangled by two illegal immigrants. The little girl’s body was found bound and stripped naked in a Houston bayou.

“As Border Patrol has intercepted more and more criminals, on August 11, 2024, DHS whistleblowers revealed that as many as 950,000 violent criminals have gone unidentified,” the Roy report said. “In some cases, CBP failed to collect DNA from nearly 70% of illegal border crossers.”

Terrorists welcome

On September 10, 2001, the country was ill-prepared for the hell that awaited it. The border crisis, security officials warn, may have planted the seeds of another 9/11.

As the Roy Report notes, “terrorists are streaming across the border in record numbers.” In fiscal year 2023, 169 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border. How many “escapees” slipped through is anyone’s guess.

“At least 99 illegal aliens on the terror watch list were released into the U.S. after being apprehended at the southern border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023,” the report said.

“It is alarming that individuals and groups with known or suspected ties to terrorism have taken advantage of our porous border to smuggle foreigners, some of whom come from countries prone to terrorism, into the United States,” the report said.

Meanwhile, drug cartels have been emboldened. According to Roy’s report, the criminal operations are raking in more than “$13 billion a year in human trafficking alone.” The abuses are appalling. A Management Alert issued last month by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General found that the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children, many of whom are at risk of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

“Mexican cartels have joined forces with Chinese criminal syndicates to produce fentanyl and smuggle it into American communities,” the white paper said.

‘Absolutely Bizarre’

None of this should come as a surprise, given that Biden had already rolled out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants before he took office. In one of his first business orders, Biden promised a 100-day moratorium on deportations and moved to protect sanctuary cities — which have been invaded by illegal immigrants — from ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies. Early on, Biden urged illegal immigrants seeking asylum to “storm” for the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We could afford to take another 2 million,” Biden said at a 2019 campaign rally in Iowa, CNN reported. “The idea that a country of 330 million people can’t take people who are in desperate need and legitimately fleeing oppression is just plain bizarre.”

In contrast to the gaslighting by Democrats and their allies in the corporate media, Biden made his vice president “border czar” and put her in charge of investigating the “root causes of migration,” which, it turns out, are Biden and Harris’ border policies.

As illegal immigration has become a top priority for the American people — and a major political liability for Biden and Harris, who stepped over the octogenarian’s political corpse en route to the Democratic presidential nomination — the gruesome duo has uncomfortably attempted to distance themselves from a crisis of their own making. Even Democratic Party operative CNN has been forced to grudgingly report that the new “Build That Wall” Kamala Harris running for president looks nothing like the 2019 presidential nominee and Biden’s vice president.

Paying the costs

The Biden-Harris border debacle has cost American taxpayers an enormous price. The Roy report shows that the bill has ballooned for southwestern border states, with Texas alone being forced to spend $13 billion on border security initiatives “to do the job the federal government refuses to do.” Biden has fought Texas’ efforts to secure its border in federal court. In January, “60 Texas counties invoked disaster declarations because of the border crisis, and 50 Texas counties passed resolutions declaring an invasion,” the report said.

“What a lot of people don’t understand is that Texas is facing a real threat to the safety and security of our citizens,” Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Center Square. “This is not an immigration policy debate that is playing out, but a constitutional threat to the sovereignty of Texas.”

The border crisis is eating up billions of dollars more in housing costs for illegal aliens, the report notes. Sanctuary City New York City alone has spent more than $1 billion on housing for the influx of immigrants. And the health care system, public schools and social services are facing unforeseen costs of caring for illegal aliens. A House committee report earlier this year on the impact of illegal immigrants on social services found that nearly 60 percent of households with illegal immigrants “receive one or more major welfare programs.”

‘Flames have spread’

The long list of victims includes illegal immigrants themselves. In fiscal 2022, a record 853 foreigners died trying to cross the southwest border, the report said. That number includes the deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history, in which 53 people, including eight children, were “boiled alive” in a tractor-trailer under the San Antonio sun.

Last year, more than 8,000 migrant deaths were recorded on migration routes worldwide, making it the deadliest year in history, according to the Migration Data Portal.

Unfortunately, the report argues, the invasion was carried out in the name of naked politics. America is far less safe because Democrats under Biden-Harris have tried to harvest the next wave of left-wing voters. The regime has fought tooth and nail against legislation like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would have required documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. As The Federalist has reported, Virginia recently purged more than 6,300 foreigners from its voter rolls. Texas did the same, possibly removing 6,500-plus noncitizens from its voter database.

The white paper calls for passage of the Secure the Border Act, not the failed Senate bill that Biden and Harris pushed for and that lawmakers have called a “joke.” As critics note, one of the “deal’s” many warts is that it would cap the number of crossings per day at 5,000 before the president closes the border.

“Radical progressive Democrats have created the worst border crisis in recent history, and the flames have spread to nearly every state and locality in the country. This crisis is rooted in a fundamental desire to reshape and entrench one-party rule based on state dependency,” the report said.

Matt Kittle is a senior election correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast and online journalism, Kittle previously served as executive director of Empower Wisconsin.