Illegal border crossings have surged since Joe Biden’s election. Some of this is related to a lack of enforcement, but the lion’s share likely comes from his rhetoric. You see, when a president telegraphs publicly that you can enter the country illegally and all you’ll get is processed and released if caught, that tends to incentivize more people to make the journey.

Of course, the biggest costs will probably never be known. That’ll come in the untold numbers of dead children, women, and men who never even make it to the border. Encouraging such dangerous acts, which directly benefit the drug cartels, is a cost-free maneuver for politicians. They get to pretend to be compassionate while others pay the real price of their virtue signaling.

But while Biden’s policies have already proven catastrophic, he’s apparently realized you do need some type of enforcement mechanism, and his new edict to ICE has the left apoplectic.

BREAKING: President Biden just issued new ICE guidance wholly abandoning his pledge to halt deportations. ACLU says this is "a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration’s earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies" of Trump and Obama.

— Colin Kalmbacher (@colinkalmbacher) February 18, 2021

The seven-page guidance can generally be characterized as a return to form viz. immigration enforcement under the Obama administration. Some of the new provisions are likely to be of extreme concern to immigrants, immigrant communities and immigration rights activists/advocates: pic.twitter.com/WktjoeV7Ua

— Colin Kalmbacher (@colinkalmbacher) February 18, 2021

Media criticism: journalists like Buzzfeed's @Haleaziz and the AP's @benfoxatap who reported on this using the Biden/DHS/ICE framing of "public safety" and "targeted enforcement" have clearly buried the lede here. And, of course, acted as stenographers for ICE's press release.

— Colin Kalmbacher (@colinkalmbacher) February 19, 2021

This is hardly the strict enforcement we saw under Trump, but it does place Biden more in the realm of Barack Obama, who did actually carry out a lot of deportations. In other words, Biden’s “no deportations” for 100 days pledge is done, and his more left-wing fans aren’t happy about it. The ACLU apparently wants no deportations ever judging by their consternation. That’s not exactly surprising given the complete abandonment of principle the last decade or so.

Unfortunately, the damage is already done. While Biden may be allowing deportations of criminals again, the surge that’s already underway won’t be stopped because perception has always mattered just as much as actual enforcement when it comes to policing the border. If people don’t come, there’s nothing to enforce. If they do come in large numbers, no level of enforcement will be enough to stop them all.

Democrats, recognizing they’ve got a PR issue on their hands, have moved quickly to cover for Biden, introducing a new amnesty bill. Incredibly, it would offer citizenship to people already legally deported because nothing has to make any sense anymore.

BREAKING: New immigration bill introduced by House and Senate Democrats will bring illegal aliens deported during the Trump administration back to the U.S. and provide them with citizenship

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 19, 2021

Such a bill will never get past a filibuster unless Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema break their very publicly stated promises. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.