Plenty of people around the world want to do Americans harm. Now they’re bringing the attack here.
And Capitol Hill is on fire after getting hit with this foreign threat.
Diverting critical resources to address the disaster at the southern border has paved the way for a surge in illegal crossings at the northern border, an expert suggests — yet another failure under the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.
“The southern border always gets the attention and, therefore, gets the resources and the money, and the northern border then has vast areas that are just wide open,” said Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Under Biden, resources have been stretched thin, leaving America’s northern border vulnerable.
“Because of the numbers of crossings on the southern border, they pull resources from the northern border to go deal with the southern border, leaving even fewer to guard the northern border,” Ries explained. The consequences of these policy failures are glaring.
A recent CBS 19 report highlighted the alarming reality. The Swanton Border Sector has seen more apprehensions in fiscal 2024 than in the last 13 years combined, with nearly 15,000 illegal crossings — an astronomical rise compared to the 2021 numbers when Biden first took office.
The northern border, which spans 295 miles across Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire, is just one of many sectors overwhelmed by the administration’s failure to secure the nation’s borders.
In fact, the entire Canadian border has been flooded with illegal crossings, setting a record of 190,000 encounters in fiscal 2023, and the numbers keep climbing in 2024.
The Biden administration’s focus on the southern border has left the north exposed, creating a perfect storm for human traffickers and smugglers to exploit the weakness.
Worse yet, the northern border has seen an influx of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs), with over 1,100 apprehended between 2021 and 2023. That number accounts for more than half of the 1,700 KSTs apprehended nationwide.
This massive security failure raises serious questions about Biden’s border priorities and whether the administration is asleep at the wheel while America’s northern frontier becomes an open door for those with ill intentions.
Ries points out that the northern border has always posed a unique challenge for U.S. Border Patrol, given that it’s more than twice as long as the southern border and includes maritime crossings through the Great Lakes region.
But under Biden’s permissive policies, those challenges have only grown worse, making it nearly impossible to maintain any semblance of control. Smugglers and traffickers have adapted to the Biden-era chaos, exploiting the north as another way to flood the country.
“We’ve got [an] open border right now, and the world knows they can get in,” Ries said, pointing out that Biden’s administration has incentivized these crossings, pulling resources from the northern border to try and contain the catastrophe at the southern border.
According to the CBS 19 report, illegal migrants from 85 different countries have been apprehended at the northern border — a staggering increase under Biden’s watch. While the White House tries to shift the blame to Republicans, the facts remain: Biden’s border policies are failing across the board.
A White House spokesperson, in an attempt to deflect responsibility, claimed that Biden has “worked to find bipartisan solutions to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system.”
But Congress hasn’t been the problem; it’s the Democrats’ policies that have left the border wide open. The administration’s so-called “solutions” have done little to stem the tide.
Ries expects the situation to worsen as long as Biden remains in office.
The administration’s decision to restart the CHNV parole program, despite fraud concerns, is yet another example of how Biden’s policies continue to encourage illegal migration.
“If people are incentivized to try to get here now, while Biden is still in power, then they’re going to, and we’re going to see numbers increase,” Ries warned.
With Biden’s immigration disaster in full swing, the border crisis will only escalate as smugglers, traffickers, and even suspected terrorists continue to exploit his administration’s failures.
Stay tuned to the Conservative Column.
