Does Not ‘Accept’ 5,000 Illegal Immigrants a Day
Leading up to the vote, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on social media said the bill “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn added her voice to the opposition, posting that she would “never vote to make illegal immigration legal.”
Those comments misrepresented the bill.
The bill stated that temporary border emergency authority would be automatically activated by the Department of Homeland Security secretary if there is an average of 5,000 or more migrant encounters a day over seven consecutive days — or if there are 8,500 or more such encounters on any single day. In December — according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection — there was an average of more than 8,000 encounters a day of migrants who crossed the border illegally between points of entry.
“It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous,” Lankford said on the Senate floor. “The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”
In a social media post on Feb. 5, Trump wrote, “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day.”
He’s wrong about the 5,000 encounters threshold. Although that is the threshold for mandatory activation of the emergency authority, the bill also would have extended “discretionary activation” to the Homeland Security secretary once there is an average of 4,000 or more encounters over seven consecutive days. Customs and Border Protection provides only monthly data, and looking at data during the Trump administration the number of encounters would have reached that threshold in May 2019, when encounters averaged 4,286 per day.
“The reason we’re doing that [providing emergency authority] is because we want to be able to shut down the system when it gets overloaded, so we have enough time to process those asylum claims,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who helped craft the bill, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Feb. 4.
“So we have placed provisions in the law that mandate the enforcement of each of these provisions of our law and require the Biden administration and any future administration to actually implement this,” Sinema, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said. “So, we’re requiring it, not permitting it.”
In other words, while President Joe Biden had said that if the bill passed he would have exercised that emergency authority immediately, it would not have been a choice at this time — it would have been mandatory.
As for claims that the bill would allow or accept 5,000 illegal crossings a day, that’s a distortion of what’s in the bill.
“That authority would be mandated when arrivals exceed an average over the previous seven days of 5,000,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior adviser on immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us via email. “This is not a number that is ‘allowed in.’ It is a threshold of ARRIVALS that triggers a new authority.”
“We already have more than 5,000 illegal crossings happening,” Brown said. “We aren’t ‘allowing it’; it is happening, and we then have to deal with it.”
“There is this idea that we control how many migrants attempt illegal crossings. We do not. The migrants (and smugglers) control that,” Brown said. “We control what happens once we encounter someone who has already crossed the border illegally.”
