We have been reading reports and talking to sources this morning to get more information and analysis on the Biden administration’s new proclamation regarding the border. Here is what we learned.

Key Points:

• The Biden Border Proclamation has so many loopholes it will fail to have any impact

• Its main purpose is electioneering

• The content of the proclamation suggests that the failed Senate immigration bill was written by DHS

• The Biden Administration’s border policy relies on bribing Mexico to do their work, which comes with significant downsides

Loopholes

Fox News’s Bill Melugin lists the loopholes in the Biden Proclamation that make it virtually toothless:

• The order bans asylum to some illegal crossers, with some exceptions, including unaccompanied minors, anyone who claims “fear” of being trafficked back to Mexico.

• “There has been no explanation as to how the administration will be able to begin mass removals of migrants coming from another hemisphere with governments that don’t cooperate with the U.S.,” Melugin points out.

• The EO does not “stop or slow the up to 1,500 migrants per day released into the U.S. via CBP One app at ports of entry”

• The EO does not “stop or slow the up to 30,000 migrants per month flying directly into the U.S. and being released into the country via Biden’s controversial mass parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.”

• The other reason, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told us, that this is toothless, is “they know it’s going to be enjoined by the courts. Their friends outside the government, who they may even have consulted with beforehand to make sure that it goes off properly, are going to sue and the federal judge in San Francisco is going to rejoin the thing, at least temporarily.”

The Political Angle and Homeland Security Fingerprints

We spoke with Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies who underscored the “undeniable” political character of this EO. “The trigger of 2500 illegal crossings rather than 4000, which is what was in the failed Senate bill, exposes how they’re really just pulling numbers out of the air,” he told us. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they actually focus-grouped these numbers. Maybe they had those dials that they sometimes use. And so they basically cooked up a way to come up with the highest number of illegal crossings that they think could still not lose them Pennsylvania and Michigan. It’s incredibly cynical.”

“It’s pretty clear from this that Homeland Security actually wrote the Senate bill,” he added. “I mean, we know that they were there in the room. And none of those three senators, not Lankford, not Murphy and not Sinema, none of them really has any expertise in immigration, nor do they have staff with that expertise. And so they were bamboozled. They were taken for a ride because they were told that the bill they were attaching their names to would do something that it didn’t do. Seeing how close this executive order is to the Senate bill suggests to me that Mayorkas really wrote the Senate bill. To be fair to Lankford, we probably shouldn’t be calling it the Lankford bill. We should be calling it the Mayorkas bill.”

Mexico’s Role

The point Krikorian underlined for us, which we thought was most interesting, was the way the Biden Administration’s border policy relies on “bribing” Mexico to do its job for it. This has a short term impact, but it means Mexico plays a de facto role in US domestic politics.

Numbers are temporarily down to about 4000 a day from 10,000 a day, “which is still ridiculous, considering that a thousand a day overwhelms the system, according to Obama’s DHS secretary. But it’s still over a million a year.” Still, it’s unlikely the strategy will last until November, because eventually smugglers will be able to bribe their way past Mexican authorities.

“There’s a clear political agenda on Mexico’s part, which is they want Biden to get re-elected. He’s a soft touch. He’s a weak man. They can have more freedom of action in all areas with regard to the United States, with a weak man like Biden in office. But it is kind of election interference,” Krikorian said. “Does anybody think that if Biden gets reelected, it’s going to keep going? After November, all of this–poof!–disappears and turns back into a pumpkin.”

As ever, we found Krikorian to be an enlightening voice on all topics related to immigration. For more, you should read our exclusive in-depth interview with him.

If you enjoyed this content, you should subscribe to the PolicySphere Morning Briefing