UPCOMING EVENT: Next week, Wednesday, February 5, at noon. FFF is hosting a get-together in downtown Boston after the oral arguments in Ian Freeman’s appeal, where we will discuss the oral arguments. I will be there. Trillium Brewing Fort Point, 50 Thomson Pl, Boston, MA 02210; (857) 449-0083; https://trilliumbrewing.com. Reminder: The Court of Appeals is located in the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse, One Courthouse Way in Boston. The oral arguments are scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on the 7th floor of the courthouse. Trillium Brewing is about one block away. See here for more details.
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The just-enacted Laken Riley Act goes a long way toward demonstrating the failure of America’s decades-old border-control system and the manifest refusal of border-control advocates to accept personal responsibility for the failure of their own system.
The law was enacted in response to the 2024 murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal immigrant named Jose Ibarra. Amidst publicity and fanfare, President Trump just signed the bill into law as one of his first steps to crack down on illegal immigration, in an effort to finally — finally! — make America’s decades-old immigration-control system work. The new law enables officials to take illegal immigrants who have been accused of committing crimes into custody before they have been convicted of a crime. Never mind that under the law, federal officials are already supposed to — and do — take illegal immigrants into custody, whether they are accused of committing a crime or not.
Proponents of the law, including President Trump, say that the reason that Ibarra illegally entered the United States is because there were “open borders” under President Biden’s administration. If Biden had not had a policy of “open borders,” they say, Ibarra would not have been able to enter the United States and Riley would be alive today.
There is one big thing wrong, however, with that justification: It’s false. In fact, it’s just a way for proponents of immigration controls to avoid accepting personal responsibility for the failure of their own immigration-control system, something they have been doing since the inception of immigration controls many decades ago.
The difference between open borders and the failure of America’s immigration-control system to work is the difference between day and night.
Open borders — genuine open borders — is the abolition of all restrictions on the freedom of people to cross borders. That necessarily means no Border Patrol, no ICE, and no border stations or border guards. Simply free movements of goods, services, and people across borders.
To get a good understanding of the concept of open borders, think about the domestic United States. It is based on a system of open borders. There are no border stations or border guards between the respective states of the Union. No state Border Patrol. No state ICE. No Berlin Walls surrounding each state. No criminalization for entering a state without official permission. Also, no ongoing, perpetual border crises between the states.
For example, every day hundreds of thousands of cars cross the Potomac River from Maryland into Virginia, where I live. There are no border guards vetting who comes into our state. Everyone, including murderers, rapists, robbers, burglars, terrorists, Muslims, communists, illegal immigrants, and even people who are trying to steal our jobs, is free to cross the border and enter our state. It truly is an amazing thing. Just think: No vetting at all! Completely open borders.
America’s domestic open-border system is one that I’d estimate 99 percent of the American people support. Yes, 99 percent (my estimate) of Americans are open-borders advocates, at least on a domestic level. The problem is that they are unable to apply their open-borders mindset to international borders. They remain deeply committed to an international border-control system, most likely because that is the system under which they were born and raised.
Thus, despite what Trump and Trumpsters maintain, it should be obvious to everyone that there was not an open-border system between the U.S. and Mexico during the Biden administration. It was always, instead, a border-control system, one that is enforced by an ever-growing tyrannical and oppressive immigration police state.
Tens of thousands of Border Patrol, ICE, DEA, FBI, and Homeland Security agents roam the borderlands. Fixed highway checkpoints. Roving Border Patrol checkpoints. Warrantless searches of farms and ranches. Boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers. A Berlin Wall. Troops along the border. Mass deportations. Violent raids on American businesses. The criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, and caring for illegal immigrants. Snitches. Massive surveillance of the borderlands.
Keep in mind something important: All of those police-state measures were in existence and being enforced when Ibarra illegally entered the United States. Now, you might ask: Jacob, how is that possible? There is no way that anyone is able to circumvent America’s decades-old immigration police state! It’s got to be that Biden ordered the Border Patrol, ICE, the DEA, and Homeland Security to stand down and stop enforcing America’s immigration police state.
In fact, that’s what a border-control advocate wrote to me. He said that Biden had issued an order ordering the Border Patrol and ICE to stand down and not enforce America’s border-control police state. It’s difficult to see how border-control advocates can get more delusional than that. Biden never issued such an order and, in fact, border-control officials continued enforcing America’s immigration police state during the entire four years that Biden was in office.
The discomforting fact that border-control advocates have not wanted to face for decades — and still do not want to face — is this: their beloved immigration police state, no matter how tyrannical and oppressive it has become, still doesn’t work, which makes them furious. It obviously did not prevent Ibarra from illegally entering the United States. That’s what border-control advocates simply cannot permit themselves to see: their police-state system has never worked and it still doesn’t work. Rather than admitting that, acknowledging it, and accepting personal responsibility for the failure of their own beloved decades-old system, they embark on enacting more immigration-control measures, like the Laken Riley Act, to distract people’s attention away from the fact that their beloved immigration-control system and the immigration police state that has come with it didn’t work to prevent Ibarra from entering the United States.
Thus, here’s the point: Ibarra’s entry into the United States wasn’t because of “open borders,” as Trump and the Trumpsters claim. His entry also wasn’t because Biden issued an order commanding border-control officials to stop enforcing the immigration police state. It was simply because America’s immigration police state didn’t work. Remember: The purpose of the immigration police state is to prevent people from entering the United States without official permission. No matter the checkpoints, the warrantless searches, and all the rest of the immigration police state, Ibarra still was able to circumvent it all. The immigration police state just didn’t work to prevent him from crossing the border and illegally entering the United States.
Under a system of genuine open borders, it is true that Ibarra would have been free to simply cross the border, enter the United States, and murder Laken Riley. But the same holds true for all those hundreds of thousands of people who cross from Maryland into Virginia every day. In fact, don’t forget that guy from Texas who recently crossed the border into Louisiana and killed all those people in New Orleans.
So, under either system — open borders or a border police state that doesn’t work — people can cross a border and commit a criminal offense. But the difference is that under a system of open borders, liberty is not destroyed with an border police state, while under an border police state, liberty is destroyed.
The decades-long chaos along the border, which is rooted in America’s decades-old immigration-control system, provides government officials with the opportunity to seduce people into sacrificing their liberty in exchange for what officials promise will be “safety” and “security.” Of course, people end up getting neither — no liberty and no security. The way I figure it is that anyone who is willing to sacrifice liberty for security doesn’t deserve either one anyway.
