Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants President Joe Biden to try something novel.
Enforce the law.
On Tuesday, the Republican governor, through state Attorney General Ashley Moody, sought to cauterize President Joe Biden’s open-borders policy, which is allowing rampant illegal immigration into America’s heartland.
Florida filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that the agencies in control of immigration policy have simply given up on enforcing federal law.
DeSantis said the lawsuit challenges the Biden administration’s policy of “catching and releasing the staggering number of illegal aliens apprehended at the border into the United States,” and seeks “to protect Florida taxpayers from bearing the burden of reckless immigration policies.”
Additionally, DeSantis announced the appointment of former U.S. Attorney Larry Keefe as the new state “public safety czar.” His mission, DeSantis said, will in part be to hold federal authorities accountable “for refusing to enforce the immigration laws of this country.”
The lawsuit notes what is obvious to anyone who chooses to look: That America’s southern border is in crisis.
Since taking office, Biden has released at least 225,000 illegal aliens into the country, the lawsuit says, with at least 50,000 of them cut loose without any processing. That violates federal law.
DeSantis acknowledges in court records that some of them have legitimate claims of asylum. Yet even so, all of them, regardless of status, are supposed to be detained upon entering the country, and the administration is obligated to put them through the “orderly process” established by Congress.
As a consequence of Biden opening the floodgates, a significant criminal element, including drug traffickers and gang members, has streamed in, as evidenced by the seizure of a record amount of fentanyl, the lawsuit contends.
Here’s one example of how Biden has abandoned federal mandates.
The lawsuit notes that during former President Donald Trump’s last full month in office, the Border Patrol released just 17 illegal immigrants into the country with a notice to appear in court later to adjudicate their cases.
Under Biden, that number has swollen to an average of 10,000 a month.
“Releasing this many arriving aliens into the interior necessarily means that the government is violating congressional commands in the immigration laws,” DeSantis argues in court documents.
“The government is not free to ignore the clear commands of Congress. It has claimed that it lacks the resources and detention capacity to process the surge of migrants arriving at the border. But the Biden Administration has actively sought to eliminate measures that increase its resources and detention capacity, such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (also known as the ‘wait in Mexico policy’), and has even asked Congress to reduce the number of immigration detention beds available to it,” the state maintains in court records.
“The Biden Administration’s illegal border policies cause Florida harm. Many of the aliens illegally released by the Biden Administration are arriving or will arrive in Florida, harming the State’s quasi-sovereign interests and forcing it to incur millions of dollars in expenses.”
In the lawsuit, the state notes that the Biden administration’s “open-borders playbook” entails a “two-pronged approach.”
The first step is to violate congressionally mandated requirements to follow immigration laws, and then “insist the government does not have the resources to comply.” Then, the plan is to “eliminate effective measures that make more detention capacity available and otherwise relieve the taxed immigration system, so these unlawful actions appear justified and necessary.”
In effect, the state says, “The Biden Administration is thus giving tens of thousands of aliens per month, in essence, license to disappear into the interior of the United States.”
Florida, court records say, “relies significantly on the federal government to fulfill its duties under the immigration laws, particularly when Congress has created mandatory obligations or otherwise limited the federal government’s discretion. As a result, there is little Florida can do about the thousands of migrants who have arrived or will arrive in Florida. Some of these unlawful aliens may be otherwise law-abiding, but others are gang members, drug traffickers, and other dangerous criminals.”
Consequently, in pointing out two effects of Biden’s failure to enforce the law, Florida taxpayers spend more than $100 million a year in detaining illegal immigrants in the prison system, and another $8,000 a year per student to educate children who come here illegally.
Ultimately, DeSantis is asking a judge to void Biden’s “arbitrary and capricious” approach to immigration policy and force the administration to actually enforce federal law.
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