Grand Canyon Times

A Newsweek columnist has criticized President Joe Biden after border patrol agents made 199,976 arrests in July alone on the country's Southern border, saying leaders like Biden and U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) aren’t matching their words with action.

In an opinion piece published Aug. 10 by UnHerd, writer Batya Ungar-Sargon said Biden’s campaign for looser border policies was to blame for “an influx of migrants since the beginning of his presidency,” many of whom say they felt encouraged to cross the border by Biden’s own words during his campaign. Ungar-Sargon also said such illegal immigration only hurts working-class Americans.

"Among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English,” she wrote in the editorial. “For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.”

Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, cited economist George Borjas, who said "immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich." 

The article also cited another study that said immigration accounted for a third of the decline in black employment in the past 40 years.

“Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” sociologist Musa al-Gharbi said, according to the UnHerd article. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or blacks.”

Another source cited by Ungar-Sargon reported that blacks and Hispanics said in 2019 that they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security as a means of reducing illegal immigration.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol data, federal agents have made 1,822,160 arrests at the Southern border since the start of fiscal year 2022 on Oct. 1, 2021. Border Patrol agents have made more than 3.3 million arrests at the Southern border since Biden took office in January 2021.

The 199,976 illegal immigrants who were apprehended at the Southern border in July represented a nearly 30% increase over July 2021, when there were 154,288, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

After a federal judge blocked Biden’s attempt to end Title 42 border detainment, the Department of Homeland Security announced in early August that it planned to end another Trump-era program, "Remain in Mexico," which allowed border agents to make detained migrants wait in Mexico until their removal hearings could be held. Ending that policy, Ungar-Sargon wrote, cleared the way “for potentially tens of thousands more migrants to enter the U.S.”

Kelly, who has repeatedly criticized Biden's alleged lack of urgency on the Southern border, "has failed to match his rhetoric with action," Collin Anderson wrote in The Washington Free Beacon in November.

"It appears that he'll give lip service to a topic, but then when push comes to shove, he's right in step with his party,” National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd said, according to The Washington Free Beacon. “And we know that as far as his party goes with border security, they're missing in action.”

Arizona Police Association president Justin Harris told the Free Beacon that Kelly was "playing politics" by playing up the issue to help get himself reelected.

According to his website, Kelly was part of a group who introduced a bipartisan Border Patrol Enhancement Act in early August, a bill that aims to create a 2,500-agent border patrol reserve force, increase the total number of agents to 20,500 and raise Border Patrol pay by 14%. The legislation would standardize professional development and training requirements for all border agents.