Only a few hundred yards from our southern border, cranes and building materials for the Trump administration-sponsored border fencing improvement initiative remain unused. 

Little more than the stroke of President Biden’s pen parked the now-idle cranes and bulldozers, and his decision to reverse the critical border security measures President Trump spent the last four years putting in place has yielded the gravest humanitarian and national security crisis at our southern border in decades. 

In the month of March alone, our country reached a grim nearly 20-year high of unlawful border crossings with more than 172,000 migrants being taken into custody – including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied minors.

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With the total number of southern border crossings for this fiscal year already exceeding half a million even before we’ve reached peak crossing season, one thing is abundantly clear: our southern border is overrun. 

The overwhelming surge has Homeland Security officials scrambling for space with the record number of migrant teens and children flooding our southern border. Emerging warning signs show an upcoming new wave of migrants could be the largest we’ve seen in decades, absent substantive and immediate intervention – something the Biden administration and their ever-absent "Border Czar" seem completely uninterested in pursuing. 

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Instead, Biden and his cohorts have taken to the age-old fail safe employed by Democrat presidents for decades: bury your head in the sand and blame your predecessor. The irony here, of course, is that the few strides we’ve made in the last decade toward managing the ongoing crisis at our southern border were made by Biden’s favorite scapegoat: President Donald Trump. 

President Trump not only acknowledged the severity of the situation unfolding at our southern border during his tenure – he took on bold solutions to solve the problem. 

Under President Trump’s leadership, border officials installed over 400 miles of robust and advanced border fencing, directly reducing border crossings in those areas by 87%. Dangerous practices like catch-and-release came to a necessary end. President Trump implemented the Remain-in-Mexico policy, taking away the incentive for migrants to come to the border in hopes of being released into the U.S. indefinitely. 

Every stroke of President Biden’s pen severely weakens America’s ability to mend our newly-broken immigration system.

While his administration gets wrapped up in virtual signaling and rolling out the red carpet to those who want to come here illegally, Biden has surrendered our borders to the dangerous cartels who have been more than happy to take over in the Biden administration’s absence. 

The result has been dangerously overcrowded detention facilities, filled with men, women and children indebted to the cartels whom they paid to smuggle them across the border. 

While President Trump strengthened border security and weakened the cartels, Joe Biden opened up America’s borders and emboldened the criminals seeking to take advantage.

President Trump’s policies were working, and the Biden administration’s deafening silence has highlighted the devastating impact of standstill leadership.

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The left would have you believe the compassionate play is to loosen enforcement and make our borders less secure. This is not true. 

On the contrary, the compassionate solution must be to not only reinstitute the enforcement of existing immigration laws, but to swiftly deliver bold immigration reform, closing loopholes exploited by cartels, and investing in programs like the Republican-sponsored Remain-in-Mexico initiative. 



Every stroke of President Biden’s pen severely weakens America’s ability to mend our newly-broken immigration system. The Trump administration proved that America’s border can be well secured, and our immigration system successfully reformed. 

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We owe it to the American people and those legally immigrating to this country to work together on swift and commonsense immigration reform. 

We owe it to the forgotten men and women of America to right the ship and restore the successful policies the Biden administration’s progressive agenda threatens to destroy.

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Mark Meadows served as White House chief of staff from 2020-21 during the Trump administration. He represented North Carolina's 11th Congressional District from 2013 to 2020, and chaired the House Freedom Caucus from 2017-19.