The Biden administration is surrendering the borders:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday said immigration officers can no longer detain and deport people from the U.S. solely because they are undocumented.

In a memo to immigration and border agency officials, Mayorkas outlined new guidelines that direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to focus on the arrest and deportation of immigrants who pose a threat to both national and border security, as well as public safety.

This includes people suspected of terrorism or espionage, those who have committed serious crimes and migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after Nov. 1, 2020.

The guidelines require a case-by-case assessment of individuals to determine if they fall under these priority categories, according to a Homeland Security press release.

ICE officers will no longer be permitted to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants who have long been “contributing members” of the U.S. community, including faith leaders, farmworkers and frontline health workers. The new guidelines also prohibit officers from detaining immigrants whose status is revealed by “unscrupulous employers,” as long as they don’t commit a major crime.

This is amnesty-lite: no citizenship, but no reason to fear arrest and deportation.

What kind of country is this, anyway? Why have a border at all? What is the value of citizenship if anybody can walk across the border and, unless they’re a terrorist or a criminal, stay in the country?

We couldn’t win in Afghanistan. We can’t even control our own borders. What can we do?

Another Mayorkas quote from the Homeland Security press release:

“As we strive to provide them with a path to status, we will not work in conflict by spending resources seeking to remove those who do not pose a threat and, in fact, make our Nation stronger.”

Yes, of course: Like diversity, Illegal Immigration Is Our Strength™. This is how the Democrats manufacture consent to give up on America for Americans and for immigrants who come in by the rules.

UPDATE: I just noticed that this post has been up overnight, and it would not allow comments. I have the post set to allow comments — I have no idea why it won’t. Sorry about that.

UPDATE.2: Devout Trump-hater Andrew Sullivan says that if Biden doesn’t get control of the border, Trump could win the White House in 2024. Excerpts:

We are in a new era of mass migration, and the US government is demonstrating in real time that it has no idea how to control it. From January through July, well over a million undocumented migrants were intercepted at the border — Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Romanians, among others — and the pace is accelerating. If those intercepted in the first half of this year formed a city, it would be the tenth largest in the US.

…

A further — and arguably central — reason for the acceleration is a change under Biden in how the US treats these intercepted newcomers. Last July, under Trump, 92 percent were expelled under the “Remain in Mexico” policy — which keeps asylum seekers out of the country while their cases are adjudicated — and under Title 42 to prevent Covid outbreaks. Only eight percent were allowed into the US, pending court dates. In July 2021, under Biden, those numbers went to 47 percent expelled and 53 percent admitted. In the latest crisis, with 15,000 Haitian migrants arriving in Del Rio, around 2,500 were sent back to Haiti (where many hadn’t lived for years), and 12,500 were allowed in. That’s an 83 percent success rate.

So what, you may ask? Don’t those 12,500 have to get their asylum cases approved in order to stay permanently and legally in the US? Theoretically yes. But the wait for a court date can be several years (the average is around two and a half years) given our broken immigration infrastructure, after which it’s inhumane (as well as extremely difficult) to send people back. There’s also currently no way to force anyone to appear at the court, and 50 percent of removal orders — failed applications for asylum resulting in deportation — are issued in absentia, i.e. without the asylum-seeker showing up. The key stat: every year only around two percent of illegal immigrants are deported. You can do the math. That’s why another 60,000 Haitians are on their way.

We don’t like to confront this ugly reality. But the moral hazard of easing the path of migrants into the US, and showing the rightful level of compassion and care, is that it incentivizes many more to come. And indeed the Biden administration was warned by both the Mexican and Panamanian governments, and by their own experts, that ending “Remain in Mexico” would trigger a flood of new migrants, because they knew if they could just get to the other side of the border, the odds of being deported are increasingly small. Biden ended the policy anyway.

And:

But the moral frisson of crafting your immigration policies simply as a photo-negative image of Trump’s was too much for the Democrats to resist. The temptation to reduce every normie concern about immigration to “white supremacy” was too hard to eschew. And the view that “All Borders Are Racist” — as perfect an expression of woke extremism as “Defund the Police” and “Pregnant People” — became an elite cause. Nation-states and borders? That has been left in the dust of the Obama era. You know: Obama, the black president who deported more illegal immigrants than any president in history and won enough white Northern working-class votes to win the Electoral College and popular vote twice.

… Worse: the immigration debate reflects an elite that simply cannot imagine why most normal citizens think that enforcing a country’s borders is not an exercise in white supremacist violence, but a core function of any basic government.

Which is to say that far from taming the brushfire of right ethno-populism, Biden may be fueling it. Trump may not need to send the country into a constitutional crisis in 2024. If mass migration continues to accelerate under this administration, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it, Tump could win that election in a romp. And deserve to.

Read it all.