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Earlier this month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on immigration that was designed to give the appearance that his administration was cracking down on illegal border crossings.

In reality, the order was a fig leaf to cover what amounts to Biden’s ongoing open-border policy that allows for mass illegal immigration. It was so riddled with exceptions and loopholes, anyone could see it was plainly a political stunt.

Then last week, news media reported that Biden is expected to announce another executive order granting amnesty to a half-million illegal immigrants, shielding them from deportation and allowing them to remain and work legally in the U.S. According to a report from NBC News, the order would create a program called “parole in place” and apply specifically to illegal immigrant spouses who have lived and worked in the U.S. for over a decade, an estimated 500,000 people.

The policy whiplash here — pretending to secure the border one week, the next week floating plans to grant a mass amnesty — is a testament to the impossible political reality of Biden’s situation vis-à-vis the border. The open-border radicals that hold sway in the Democrat Party need to be appeased with mass amnesty after even the appearance of a border crackdown by the Biden White House.

Why would Biden need to create the appearance of a crackdown? Because recent polling indicates Americans across the political spectrum are fed up with Biden’s border crisis, including 58 percent of women and 53 percent of Hispanics who now say they support mass deportations, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll of registered voters. 

Even given the usual caveats about the reliability of polling, results like these, together with consistent polling for months showing immigration is a top priority for voters, suggest Democrats have a major political problem on their hands ahead of the November election.

Hence, Biden’s fig leaf of an executive order. News reports emphasized that the June 4 order would shut down asylum claims for everyone apprehended crossing the border illegally (between ports of entry) whenever there is an average of 2,500 daily crossings over a seven-day period — a threshold that had already been met the week the order was announced.

This made it sound like Biden was getting tough on the border, capping illegal crossings at 2,500 per day, which was certainly the spin the White House was going for. Announcing the order, Biden blamed Republicans for refusing to pass a terrible immigration reform bill earlier this year, boasting that he’s “moving past Republican obstruction and using the executive authorities available to me as president to do what I can on my own to address the border.”

But the order itself belies the fact that it’s pure window dressing that won’t actually reduce illegal immigration. As Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies explained in a post earlier this month, the order contains such expansive exceptions that it’s unlikely to move the needle on illegal crossings.

What’s more, a subsequent memo sent to Border Patrol on what to do with illegal immigrants arrested after Biden’s order took effect makes it clear that illegal crossings won’t be plummeting anytime soon. The memo splits illegals into groups based on whether they hail from an “easy to remove” country in either the Eastern or Western Hemisphere or a “hard to remove” country in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The upshot is that the countries sending the vast majority of illegal immigrants — Mexico; the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras; as well as Cuba; Haiti; Nicaragua; and Venezuela — will have special processes in place to allow them to start their asylum claims at ports of entry instead of after being arrested for entering the U.S. illegally.

For Mexican nationals, it means allowing illegal border-crossers to “voluntarily remove” themselves back to Mexico without a formal hearing or removal orders issued, which will let them schedule their illegal entry at a port of entry using the CBP One app (which is a total scam).

Those apprehended from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela will be allowed to withdraw their applications for asylum and return to Mexico — that is, unless they are among the 30,000 parolees granted entry to the U.S. as part of a separate, unadjudicated Biden administration scheme.

Citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras will be processed for expediated removal, which will send them back to Mexico where they can apply for entry at a port using the CBP One app. And all other nationals from the Western Hemisphere are to be released with a notice to appear before an immigration judge at some future date, and not to be detained.

If you cut through all the bureaucratic jargon and obfuscation, what this means is that no matter what the White House says about cracking down on asylum claims, the Biden administration has devised ways of maintaining the steady flow of illegal immigrants into the country, along with the administrative means of releasing them from federal custody.

At the same time, the administration is planning to grant a mass amnesty to illegals who broke our immigration laws years ago — which would-be illegal immigrants all over the world will rightly interpret as a sign that if they can get across the border, they’ll be allowed to stay. And of course, they’re exactly right.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.