Mark Krikorian

New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask almost everyone he met, “How’m I doing?” Trump hasn’t asked me “How’m I doing?” on immigration, but if he did, I’d answer, “Outstanding, Mr. President, but with one hiccup and much left to do.” The first challenge the President faced was to stop the disaster at the border. And he’s succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. As journalist Byron York asked on X, “How many presidents solve a problem... that was a huge issue in the campaign, and solve it in the first few months of their presidency?” Arrests at the southern border in May were down 93 percent from the same time last year.

It's always easier to break something than to build it. Joe Biden broke the immigration control system that he'd inherited from Donald Trump and that had been built up over several administrations of both parties. Rebuilding it after Biden's vandalism will take time. Even if Republicans win the majority in both houses of Congress in November, it will take a change in administration before any real reconstruction can begin. With more than 2 million "encounters" with illegal border-crossers over the past year, more than any year in history, restoring order may seem like an insuperable task. But as we saw right after Trump's election and during the first months of his presidency, a simple expression of will can have a huge influence on prospective illegal aliens and their smugglers.

President Biden told NBC at the end of last month that the border crisis is ‘way down now; we've now gotten control’. At first glance, this is preposterous. The number of border arrests in April was a 21-year high, at more than 178,000, with more than a third of all arrests being families or unaccompanied minors. To get a sense of the scale, President Obama's Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, has said that 1,000 border arrests a day 'overwhelms the system’ — in April, daily arrests averaged nearly 6,000. Does that sound like a border that's under 'control’? But President Biden's seemingly absurd comment isn't simply another in his endless series of gaffes.