President-elect Donald Trump has promised to crack down on the southern border and deport those here illegally.
But the million-dollar question left by the Biden administration: Just how many people is that?
A recent House Judiciary report says that “For almost four years, Americans have watched as President Joe Biden and border czar Vice President Kamala Harris have abandoned the southwest border and welcomed nearly 8 million illegal aliens into the United States.”
But that 8 million is likely an undercount — and perhaps by a lot.
The House Committee on Homeland Security estimated in the spring that there would have been 10 million encounters during Biden’s four-year term. And that doesn’t include “got-aways” — people who crossed illegally without ever talking to a Border Patrol agent.
There are, meanwhile, all kind of “parole” and other programs the Biden administration used without Congressional approval to fly immigrants in directly from South America and other parts of the world.
So what’s the final figure? 12 million? More?
The administration refuses to say.
When Vice President Kamala Harris was pressed on the number of migrant releases by Bret Baier of during his Fox News interview with the Democratic presidential candidate on October 16, Harris demurred not once but four times.
Similarly, when Baier asked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in January for just a percentage of the migrants his department has encountered and released, Mayorkas claimed he knew “the data,” but refused to reveal it.
That lack of transparency quickly became an issue for school systems across the United States, which had no idea more than a half million migrant students — few of whom had any English competency and many of whom had no formal education — would soon be filling their classrooms.
Likewise, cities far from the border were whipsawed as they struggled to accommodate migrant arrivals because the administration refused to say how many migrants it had released, and how many more would be coming.
Consequently, more than a few of localities had to scramble to cut costs for essential police and fire services to provide for the housing, medical, and educational needs of their burgeoning migrant populations — with no end in sight.
Between 1900 and 1915, considered one of the great migration periods of American history, 15 million people migrated to the US — many through Ellis Island.
Biden seems to have approached as massive a figure in modern times, but tried to keep it hidden from the American people.
We won’t be able to calculate the costs of that crisis until Trump takes office and offers a full accounting of unlawful, but government-sanctioned immigration here since 2021.
Lying to the American people about what they can see with their own eyes is a poor politics, but more importantly it undermines faith in our democracy.
Why were voters most concerned about threats to our democracy more inclined to support Trump? Start with everything the administration hasn’t told you about migrants and the border since January 2021.
Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
