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Gallup Poll: Biden’s Border Invasion Is Americans’ No. 1 Worry


BY: M.D. KITTLE | FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/27/gallup-poll-bidens-border-invasion-is-americans-no-1-worry/

migrants flee at southwest border

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A New Gallup poll finds a record-high number of Americans believe illegal immigration is a “critical threat” to the nation’s vital interests. Voters are clearly blaming President Joe Biden and his band of leftists for the invasion the nation has endured over the past three years. 

The latest survey of more than 1,000 adults nationwide, conducted Feb. 1-20, shows 55 percent of U.S. respondents believe that “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” is a “critical threat” to the nation — up 8 percentage points from last year’s poll. The significant majority of Americans deeply concerned about illegal immigration surpasses the previous high of 50 percent recorded in 2004, according to Gallup. 

“Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28%) than did a month ago (20%),” the famed national pollster notes. “Immigration has now passed the government as the most often cited problem, after the two issues tied for the top position the past two months.”

Concern over the illegal immigration crisis is at the highest level in the 40-plus years Gallup has been tracking the issue. 

The poll finds congressional job approval, long in the basement, dipped to just 12 percent. It’s the lowest approval rating for the legislative body since November 2015, when it hit 11 percent, and just a few points above its rock bottom of 9 percent in November 2013. 

Gallup conducted the poll as a ludicrous border “reform” bill, which was really just a Trojan horse for more Ukraine funding and would have codified the continuing illegal immigration threat, faltered in the U.S. Senate. The deal, puppeteered in large part by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have faced a near-certain death in the Republican-controlled House. 

Biden’s job performance on immigration has sunk to 28 percent, a personal low for the Democrat, according to the new Gallup poll. That’s down from a CBS poll last month that found just 32 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of border security, an all-time low at that time. The latest monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, released on Monday, records a 35 percent approval rating for Biden on immigration, his lowest rating on any issue in that survey. 

“While many Americans regard the economy, generally, or inflation, specifically, as the most important problem facing the U.S., far more name immigration,” Gallup notes in an overview of the poll. “Immigration now sits alone at the top of the most important problem list, something it has done only occasionally in Gallup’s trend and not since 2019.”

Biden’s Border Debacle Hitting Home

Not even the coddling accomplice media can cover for the addled president and the disasters his immigration policies have wrought. The let-‘em-all-in left certainly can’t hide from the stark numbers. 

In fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s tenure, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded about 400,000 encounters of illegal aliens attempting to enter the southwest United States. Three years later, on Biden’s watch, agents encountered 2.4 million illegal immigrants at the border with Mexico, 3.2 million nationwide.  

Facing abysmal poll numbers and a real threat to his reelection chances, Biden audaciously told 30 of the nation’s governors last week that his hands are tied on cleaning up the mess he’s made. In a bald-faced lie for the ages, the president barked at a White House meeting that he’s not to blame for the border debacle and that the governors need to “show a little spine” and urge their members of Congress to pass the “bipartisan security bill” that recently went down in flames. 

Half of the nation’s governors are standing with Texas in its right to defend itself against the invasion of illegal immigrants attempting to flood the Lone Star State. The Biden administration has fought against Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to “fill the dangerous gaps created by the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border,” according to the governor’s office. 

“Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies,” stated an Abbott press release issued after the governor welcomed 13 of his fellow Republican governors to Eagle Pass, a border town overtaken by illegal aliens. 

Biden’s helpless act isn’t playing well with Americans. Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said the president has had the authority to tighten security at the southwest border since he took office at noon, Jan. 20, 2021 — if nothing else, by leaving things alone.

“The law is not only clear that he not only can enforce immigration laws, he is required to enforce them and he simply has been ignoring them,” the immigration reform activist told me last week on the “Simon Conway Show” on WHO in Des Moines. 

In fact, Biden has signed an array of executive orders — early and often — reversing Trump’s work on securing the border. One of his first acts as president was killing construction of his predecessor’s border wall. Biden brought back catch-and-release and ended the remain-in-Mexico policy, among other executive actions that have effectively erased the United States’ southwest border. 

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said at the time. 

The results have been devastating, well beyond the border. Americans from the largest cities dealing with the massive influx of illegal aliens to small towns confronting rising crime and a fatal fentanyl epidemic are on the frontlines of Biden’s war on the border. 

Last week, 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Hope Riley was assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. An illegal immigrant from Venezuela has been arrested in connection with the crime, according to law enforcement, and is reportedly “expected to be charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another.” As my Federalist colleague Jordan Boyd writes, corporate media are trying to cover up that inconvenient truth, but Americans know the deadly consequences of Biden’s open border policies. The latest poll numbers confirm it.

Organizations like the Job Creators Network want to make sure Americans don’t forget who is responsible for the border invasion. JCN recently put up a billboard in New York City’s Times Square featuring a video of NYPD officers being beaten by a group of illegal immigrants. The billboard’s message to the president — and the country: “Hey Joe! If cops aren’t safe because of your open borders, nobody is.” 


Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Dispatch From Eagle Pass: Biden Officials Won’t Enforce Laws But ‘Don’t Want Anyone Else To’ Either


BY: M.D. KITTLE | FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/13/dispatch-from-eagle-pass-biden-officials-wont-enforce-laws-but-dont-want-anyone-else-to-either/

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In his appearance Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” embattled U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did what any failed political leader possessing little integrity and less self-awareness would do: He blamed others for his mistakes. Asked whether he bears any responsibility for the nightmare the Biden administration has wrought at the U.S. southern border and beyond, Mayorkas effectively said, don’t look at us

“It certainly is a crisis and we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system, and we’re dealing a tremendous amount within that broken system,” he told moderator Kristen Welker. 

Maybe the secretary should talk to the people living in and around the border towns, local law enforcement, and his own U.S. Border Patrol agents. 

Ira Mehlman and the folks from FAIR — the Federation for American Immigration Reform — did just that earlier this month. 

“Ask the people at the border in Texas. They think the blame belongs squarely with [the Biden administration],” the FAIR media director told me Monday morning on “Need to Know With Jeff Angelo” on NewsRadio 1040 in Des Moines. 

Earlier this month, Mehlman and his traveling companions saw the illegal immigration crisis firsthand at Eagle Pass, a south Texas city of about 28,000 people bordering Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. As the Dallas Morning News explained, “Eagle Pass, with two small international bridges, features relatively gentle Rio Grande currents that invite migrant crossings. It became a focal point of Texas action in December when the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants over multiple weeks overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and city resources.”

The border town has become a hive of humanity, as its population swells from a wave of illegal aliens pouring over the border on promises of easy entry from President Joe Biden and his nearly impeached Homeland Security chief. U.S. Customs and Border Protection still has yet to post numbers for January apprehensions at the Southwest border, but December saw a new all-time monthly record with more than 300,000 migrant apprehensions. Eagle Pass and its Del Rio sector alone have recorded a whopping 152,252 encounters in the first three months of the federal fiscal year, beginning in October, according to the agency.  

Eagle Pass is now ground zero in a standoff between the state of Texas and the Biden administration, just as it is Exhibit A in the administration’s chaotic immigration policy. Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by several states, ordered state National Guard troops to stand guard at Eagle Pass’s gates and erect razor wire to check the invasion. A divided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court order gave the administration the go-ahead to cut the wire, but Abbott is holding firm, arguing his state is under attack and the president is doing nothing to stop it. Abbott stands on his constitutional obligation to defend and protect his state, and the United States at large, from invasion.  

“The message from the Biden administration is: Not only don’t we want to enforce immigration laws, we don’t want anyone else to do it,” Mehlman said. 

The immigration reform activist says, from what he saw on his latest trip to Eagle Pass, Abbott’s strategy is working. And, from what’s he’s heard from law enforcement officials, there have been few attempts from federal authorities to remove the deterrents Texas has put in place. Abbott has said his Operation Lone Star has reduced illegal immigration numbers, a claim backed by a new Washington Examiner analysis. 

“The numbers show how the percentage of arrests in Texas versus other border states has shifted. In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas,” the publication reported on Monday.

“As Abbott stepped up security at the start of the Biden administration in 2021, arrests of illegal crossers began to fall and dropped to just 34% last month.”

“This is a manageable problem, as Gov. Abbott has now demonstrated. If you deter people from coming across you will see the results almost immediately,” Mehlman said. 

Mehlman does acknowledge, however, that the migrants are simply rerouting to Arizona and California, border states led by leftist governors committed to Biden’s open border policies. 

Shifting blame, Mayorkas insists Congress is the “only one who can fix” the five-alarm border fire that he and Biden have dumped gasoline on. The secretary conveniently omits the many Trump-era policies the president has reversed and the orders he could sign to turn the tide of the illegal immigration flood. My colleague Tristan Justice last week detailed the dozens of times Biden has gutted border security since he took the oath of office. 

The U.S. Senate’s bad joke of a border deal that died an ignominious death last week would have essentially codified the Biden administration’s awful policy to date. Mehlman and other critics say it would have exacerbated the crisis. He said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his top negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., “sold out” the House’s “good” version of the bill, creating a “lose-lose situation” for lawmakers serious about border security. 

Meanwhile, last week’s failed effort by House Republicans to impeach Mayorkas is regrouping. Speaker Mike Johnson appears to believe his fellow Republicans will have the numbers —narrowly — this time around as Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is back to political business after undergoing cancer treatment during last week’s vote. 

Mehlman said Mayorkas deserves to be impeached. 

“He has undermined the enforcement of our immigration laws, he has violated his oath of office and he’s been derelict in his duty as secretary of Homeland Security,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform official said. 


Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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