Needed: A Bipartisan Truth Commission on Biden’s Border Crisis
There must be accountability for the greatest mass migration in world history
By any metric, the great mass migration crisis at the U.S. southwest border stands as a transformational event of lasting consequence in American history. It has flooded the nation with at least 10 million foreign nationals for some 45 consecutive months. Its beginning may be traced to Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021. Its end may come as soon as 2025.
This was the largest, most sustained mass migration border crisis ever recorded in the United States. It will affect all Americans in one form or another, beginning with its having, by most accounts, just decided an American presidential election.
Yet as this debacle seems poised to draw to a close, many questions—the causes of the crisis, its full magnitude, and the range of consequences—are all in dispute among the American public.
To address this destructive state of affairs, a bipartisan national congressional or presidential investigative commission is now necessary to study and then write the official government history of all that happened at the U.S. Southwest Border from January 2021 to the present.
Why?
Because allowing competing partisan-driven narratives to fester without end, in a permanent state of national dispute without an agreed-upon basic fact set, will almost certainly undermine future public policy solutions. To relax the tensions between Americans on this one defined issue of high public interest, and to stave off cyclical border crisis repeats, we must have clarity.
National commissions of this sort can have a wide variety of powers—investigatory, policy-oriented, or commemorative. Generally speaking, they are temporary formal groups established to investigate a particular problem, issue, or event and to provide independent legislative or executive office recommendations for action. Relatively trusted commissions have cleared the air for 150 years of damaging conspiracy theories and public disputes over obviously consequential events in American life so that policy makers can move forward with fact sets that are commonly accepted by most.
It’s true that commissions can sometimes be wasteful. Sometimes their suggestions are ignored. The Hard-Rudman Commission released a report in 1998 that fruitlessly warned about the potential for a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil three years before 9/11. But many others have mattered greatly for what they found and are still commonly invoked to settle matters of enduring public interest—such as for instance the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission that issued its famed report in 2004.
Or consider the Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which investigated abuses by the U.S. intelligence community against domestic political groups and led to permanent rules restricting surveillance against people on U.S. soil. The Warren Commission’s 1964 report laid out everything it could say at the time about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, pretty much laying to rest conspiracy theories about multiple shooters. The Rogers Commission issued a final investigative report about the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, leading to permanent changes at NASA. The U.S. presidential Tower Commission investigated the Iran-Contra Affair, laying bare a vast secret foreign military venture during the Ronald Reagan administration.
The power in the rich tradition of U.S. national investigative commissions is that they are populated by overseers and appointees that are politically acceptable to all sides and whose final conclusions are therefore, mostly, trusted. Plenty are forevermore cited as the final authoritative reference on the controversial events that birthed them.
Congress alone has ordered up more than 100 such commissions just since 1989, according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. Presidents have ordered 45 others. All of them, at the very least, serve the noble purpose of feeding sound information to future American historians.
“Throughout American history, Congress has found commissions to be useful tools in the legislative process, and legislators continue to use them today,” the CRS report said of congressional commissions. “By establishing a commission, Congress can potentially provide a highly visible forum for important issues and assemble greater expertise than may be readily available within the legislature. Finally, the non-partisan or bipartisan character of most congressional commissions may make their findings and recommendations more politically acceptable, both in Congress and among the public.”
Breaking the Stonewall
Throughout the nearly four years of the crisis, President Joe Biden, his staff, media outlets, and prominent partisan pundits systematically denied that anything was amiss at the border. From the top down for all four years of the term—including, most damagingly for candidate Kamala Harris, the presidential campaign—the administration insisted that what happened was entirely disconnected from its own suite of policies.
Official White House communications policy required that Biden’s top cabinet members and border agency chiefs publicly assert that nothing out of the ordinary was even underway at the border, that they call what was happening a “management challenge,” or that they publicly and repeatedly assert in the face of video evidence and credible reporting that “the border is secure.”
“Nothing has changed. It happens every single year,” Biden told reporters, for instance, at a March 25, 2021 press conference—by which point all-time national crossing records had just been broken. “It’s a seasonal thing…earthquakes, floods…lack of food. It’s because of gang violence and because of a whole range of things.” Claims like this found traction in mainstream media outlets for all four years.
This official government positioning created an almost intractable condition in which the all-important question of what caused the crisis remains in widespread dispute.
The need is already acute for an independent commission to distill indisputable factual causes from the political noise. It could help salve what will otherwise be painful national division to come as President-elect Trump moves forward with his own policies and legislation. The American public doesn’t know what they need to know. Times of great need lie immediately ahead, and the tone set now will likely persist during the terms of future presidents beyond Trump.
The Biden Administration systematically shut down efforts to wring from it real data and information that will be necessary to ease the national conflict. America and its leaders need the data to show what happened to public safety and national security. They need to know the full scale of government expenditures at home and abroad. They need to know where everyone went and how the government handled them once inside.
Almost none of these things are known, because the Biden Administration did not want America to know. Filling in these gaping holes in public knowledge is a mandatory first step toward knowing how even to begin addressing the consequences of what happened.
After U.S. military authorities charged two Jordanian illegal aliens with an alleged truck ramming attack at Marine Corps Base Quantico in the summer of 2024, Republican lawmakers and the governor of Virginia fired off six letters to senior Biden Administration cabinet members demanding information about the incident. All that mail went unanswered.
Likewise stonewalled were Republican lawmakers who in early 2024 sent more information demand letters, requesting to know more about a major FBI counterterrorism sting that resulted in the arrests in three U.S. cities of eight Tajik border-crossers on suspicions having to do with bomb-making. These represent a fraction of a far greater whole that highlights a pattern of purposeful information suppression by the Biden administration as to what its policies at the border wrought, information that will be needed for years to come beyond just the Trump administration.
This neglect, if that was all it was, has proven debilitating to any meaningful attempt to address the problems wrought by this crisis or future ones. The American people living in cities driven to bankruptcy and internal political conflict by the crisis deserve to know the scale of what happened to them at the local level—how, who was responsible, and who benefitted.
For four years, lawmakers representing those cities and states have been lodging formal information requests for details about where the immigrants ended up, criminal alien locations and deportation efforts involving them, programs for resettling underaged migrants with foster adults, government expenditures on migrant resettlement and transportation, taxpayer funding to the United Nations and migrant advocacy Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) at home and abroad, ad hoc parole admissions programs, and the outcomes of various major policy pronouncements and rule changes.
No one really knows how many written demands the Biden administration received from lawmakers, or answered, about just these few consequences of the four-year crisis.
But what is certain is that the administration ignored far more of those congressional requests than anyone knows.
The same goes for the unknown numbers of U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests the administration denied, or let go unfilled, or forced into litigation. As with congressional requests, no one can really say how many border-related FOIA requests were denied on spurious grounds or were allowed to languish.
But the Center for Immigration Studies experience provides one small glimpse into how the Biden administration handled FOIAs about the border.
Since June of 2023, the Center submitted nearly 200 FOIA requests regarding immigration issues and was forced to file lawsuits for 25 of them when they were allowed to languish unfilled. More than 35 others submitted more than a year ago and not fulfilled would be in litigation now too but for bandwidth to do so, said Colin Farnsworth, CIS’s Chief FOIA Counsel.
A chief purpose of any commission (or perhaps an associated office of request fulfillment) would fill them all now and use the data in final reports.
But the main purpose of a commission on the mass migration crisis of 2021-2025 is to fix and heal America. Let that be done.
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Todd Bensman is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and the senior national security fellow for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.
This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.