Marco Rubio: Who’s to blame for our open border? The answer may (not) surprise you | Opinion

Last November, Venezuelan man Jose Valera was discovered strangled in his car. Authorities now pin the crime on notorious Venezuelan narco-terrorists called Tren de Aragua. It’s an awful, but familiar story from cartel-controlled countries to our south. Except that this crime happened in Florida, not Venezuela.

Tren de Aragua has set up shop in cities like Miami, bringing the horrors of the Latin American underworld to our neighborhoods. And it happened almost overnight, because our border is radically insecure.

President Joe Biden blames this problem on Republicans in Congress. “Give me the money,” he told reporters last week. But he isn’t asking for money to build a wall, enforce existing laws or deport illegal immigrants. Instead, the president’s longstanding plea is for funds to speed up the processing of those immigrants into the U.S.

The greatest factor driving the border crisis is President Biden himself. This isn’t just a talking point. Just look at all the actions that led us to this point.

The first was Joe Biden’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. In 2020, Biden said: “What I would do as president is…immediately surge to the border all those people who are seeking asylum.”

Before the election even took place, illegal immigration began to rise. Within days of his inauguration, President Biden placed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, halted construction of the border wall, dismantled Remain in Mexico and ended the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, which redirected migrants to safe third countries in our region.

It didn’t matter to President Biden that the policies he reversed correlated with a 45-year low in illegal immigration. All that mattered was that their author was former President Donald Trump. The result was a doubling of border patrol encounters in little more than a month.

The administration didn’t stop there. In 2022, news broke that the White House was releasing single adult males en masse. The president also announced that he would end the use of Title 42, a pandemic-era authority that allowed law enforcement to speed up illegal immigrant removals. (Meanwhile, left-wing activists still advocated mask mandates and forced vaccinations for citizens.)

The administration had not used Title 42 to maximal effect, but these changes signaled an unwillingness to deter cartels and coyotes, so more migrants headed north. December 2022 saw border encounters top 250,000 — at that time, the highest ever recorded.

President Biden could have responded by admitting fault and reinstating Trump-era policies Instead, the administration spent most of last year sparring with state governments forced to take border security into their own hands.

The administration also unilaterally expanded parole authority, creating new, quasi-legal pathways for more than one million people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and elsewhere to enter the U.S. Finally, the administration released millions more immigrants into our country under minimal scrutiny — and in complete violation of federal law.

More than seven million people have illegally migrated to the U.S. since President Biden took office. More than 302,000 migrated last December alone. Roughly 1,700 have died on U.S. soil.

In addition, more than 440,000 children have been trafficked, a quarter of whom have since been “lost” by the federal government. The fentanyl death rate is above 100,000 per year and climbing. More than 300 suspected terrorists have been caught crossing the border, while thousands more have potentially slipped through the cracks.

Add the murder of Jose Valera to that list, and you get a catalog of disasters so horrifying that it should elicit a day of reckoning in the White House. But no, the president blames Republicans, then brags about facilitating the arrival of more illegal immigrants.

There’s much talk about an immigration “deal,” but that talk is currently unrealistic. If President Biden were serious, he would reinstate Trump-era policies, then ask Congress for additional authority. Unfortunately, President Biden gives no indication of being serious, and there is no reason to think that will change if Congress passes another law.

U.S Sen. Marco Rubio represents Florida.

This story was originally published January 26, 2024 at 1:10 PM.