We already looked at the shockingly low number of arrests and prosecutions in violent crime cases in Chicago this morning. But far away on the southern border of the United States there appears to be an even more significant decline in prosecutions of a different sort of crime. In case you missed it because of the scant amount of media coverage it receives, the Biden border crisis hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s getting worse, with record numbers of illegal migrants pouring into the country every month. What’s changed dramatically is the number of illegal migrants who are being detained and prosecuted. As the Free Beacon reports this week, the number of illegal migrants who are being prosecuted has plunged, even as the number of people illegally crossing into the country continues to steadily climb. The number of migrants prosecuted in fiscal year 2021 was less than 22% of the number of prosecutions in the previous year. And the 2020 numbers were already rather pathetic given the flood of people pouring into the country.

The Biden administration dramatically reduced migrant prosecutions by nearly 80 percent in the 2021 fiscal year, even as illegal crossings skyrocketed.

Just 2,896 migrants apprehended on the southwest border were transferred into U.S. Marshals Service custody in the 2021 fiscal year, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. In the 2020 fiscal year, 13,213 migrants were transferred to federal authorities for prosecution.

The precipitous drop in migrant prosecutions illustrates President Joe Biden’s break from prior administrations’ policies toward illegal immigration. Refraining from bringing criminal charges against the vast majority of individuals entering the country illegally also provides evidence for critics who say the White House is exacerbating the migration crisis on the southern border.

The lack of prosecutions is not a result of there being fewer migrants to potentially prosecute. Border Patrol estimates indicate that more than two million people crossed into the country illegally in 2021. And we are currently on track to exceed that number in 2022. None of this is happening by accident, just in case you were wondering. The Biden administration has made it more appealing for illegal aliens to jump the border and reduced the consequences for people who do so. Why wouldn’t they show up in droves?

If we were able to prosecute more than 12,000 people in 2020, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t have been able to prosecute at least that many if not a few more last year. Instead, we prosecuted ten thousand fewer illegals. This is an issue of failed policies, not a failure of security measures, though we still have plenty of those as well.

We obviously can’t hold and prosecute two million people in a single year. We simply don’t have the room to hold them all even if the will existed inside the White House to do so. We don’t even have the resources to vet the ones we manage to catch and at least try to weed out the actual terrorists among them. We did manage to catch 15 people on the terror watch list last month, but those are only the ones we managed to identify. There’s simply no way of knowing how many more slipped through.

There is a solution to this crisis available to us and it could be put in place relatively quickly if Joe Biden was interested in even trying to secure the border. (He’s not, by the way.) We need to continue construction on the wall and decrease the number of places where migrants can easily cross. That would allow our available resources to be concentrated on a smaller amount of territory. Then we need to be locking up as many people as we can find room for and immediately ship the rest back to their home countries or at least into Mexico. But most importantly, we need to demonstrate that the open borders are now closed and the gravy train has come to a halt. This human flood is washing over our borders because they took Joe Biden at his word that they would be allowed to stay here in violation of the law. If we can demonstrate that this is no longer the case, the flow will slow to its previous levels. It’s really just that simple.