President Joe Biden's first months in office have been marked by growing humanitarian and national security crises at the southern border, as border patrol sees a record number of illegal crossings with no real strategy from the administration. The president's designated "border czar," Vice President Kamala Harris, took nearly 100 days to acknowledge the crisis.
The Biden administration's border crisis is so grave that even the Washington Post editorial board took note of the president's failure to have a cohesive border strategy.
"In its apparent desperation to fashion an immigration strategy that will impose order on increasingly out-of-control migration, the Biden administration has unleashed a torrent of words and goals untethered to specific policies and timetables. To date, on immigration, officials have effectively reversed and rolled back some of the Trump administration's most pernicious policies, but without a clear road map to address the immediate crisis — a decades-high surge in illegal border-crossing — or the long-term challenge driving migration: dysfunction, disorder and decay in Central America," the board wrote in a scathing criticism of the administration. "That failure is measurable, and it is politically toxic. As of mid-July, a staggering 1.1 million unauthorized border crossers had been apprehended so far in the current fiscal year, which began last Oct. 1. Nearly 190,000 migrants, a record monthly total high, were taken into custody by border officers in June alone, when the early summer's heat often deters many from making the trek. At the current pace, officials project that apprehensions will reach 1.5 million by the end of the fiscal year, the most in more than two decades."
The crisis at the southern border is just one of many crises for the Biden administration.