A sitting U.S. senator says former Biden administration officials “should be in prison” for border policies that coincided with the highest migrant crossing numbers in American history.
Story Snapshot
- Senator Eric Schmitt says Biden-era officials deserve prison time over border decisions made as crossings hit record highs.
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2,475,669 Southwest-border encounters in fiscal year 2023, part of more than 8.72 million since 2021.
- A House Homeland Security Committee report used sworn interviews with former top border officials to argue the crisis was “by design.”
- No document, memo, or admission made public so far shows officials intended to boost migration for electoral reasons.
- The Biden administration later tightened asylum rules and said encounters fell 55% within seven weeks of a June 2024 crackdown.
Record Crossings Fuel the Outrage
Border encounters reached numbers never seen before during the Biden presidency. Customs and Border Protection logged 2,475,669 Southwest-border encounters in fiscal year 2023, topping the 1,734,686 recorded in fiscal year 2021 and the 2,378,944 from fiscal year 2022. Agency data show more than 8.72 million encounters total from 2021 onward, a figure that fuels Schmitt’s anger and anchors broader claims that federal officials let the border situation spiral out of control.
Those numbers reflect encounters, not unique people. Customs and Border Protection counts repeat crossings, asylum processing, and expulsions under one umbrella, meaning the same migrant can get counted more than once. That distinction matters for anyone trying to turn raw totals into a precise picture of how many people actually entered and stayed in the country.
Congress Documents the Policy Shift
House Homeland Security Committee investigators built their case on transcribed interviews with former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, and chief patrol agents from all nine Southwest-border sectors. Their September 2024 report, titled “Crisis by Design,” argues the administration’s early moves to end Title 42 expulsions and wind down the Migrant Protection Protocols directly triggered the surge that followed.
A February 2024 congressional letter laid out the timeline critics cite most often. It says encounters jumped more than 70,000 in the month after the administration stopped enforcing some Title 42 expulsions in February 2021, and that 241,136 encounters followed in May 2022, right after the administration signaled plans to end Title 42 altogether.
The Missing Proof Behind the Prison Talk
Schmitt’s call for prison time rests on a claim that goes further than the evidence currently shows. Congressional investigators have documented policy changes and their timing next to rising encounter numbers, but no released memo, directive, or sworn statement proves officials opened the border on purpose to help Democrats win elections. That gap between the accusation and the paper trail is the weakest link in the case against Biden-era officials.
PolitiFact reviewed a similar claim that Biden ran a “voter importation” scheme and found it unsupported. The fact-check also noted Biden increased immigration enforcement during the 2024 election year, which cuts against the idea that his administration pursued open borders purely for political gain.
Biden Officials Point to Later Crackdown
The Biden administration defended its record by pointing to a June 2024 proclamation that restricted entry and tightened asylum eligibility. The Department of Homeland Security said the rule helped cut Southwest-border encounters by 55% within seven weeks and that officials removed or returned more than 65,000 people to over 125 countries while cutting releases pending removal hearings by 70%.
Migration Policy Institute researchers reported that encounters dropped to 1.5 million in fiscal year 2024, the lowest level since fiscal year 2020, after those restrictions took hold. That decline complicates any narrative claiming the administration never changed course, even as the earlier surge numbers remain real and well documented.
A Pattern Bigger Than One Administration
Border surges have followed policy shifts, labor demand, and global instability for decades, not just one president’s choices. That history doesn’t erase the frustration many Americans feel watching record crossing numbers get explained away by officials on both sides. What voters on the left and right increasingly share is doubt that anyone in Washington, regardless of party, truly controls the system or answers for its failures.
Sources:
youtube.com, lankford.senate.gov, speaker.gov, cbp.gov, dhs.gov, bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov, thecentersquare.com
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