Donald Trump has been re-elected as president of the U.S. in a major rebuke of the Biden Administration’s anti-borders policies.
There are many reasons the 45th president of the U.S. will now become the 47th, but no singular issue played more of a role in Trump’s re-election than the one that his been the centerpiece of his political identity since he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower nearly a decade ago. Over the past four years, the Biden Administration has flung open our border, flooded our communities with criminal illegal aliens, and placed our national security in peril, all in service of a pernicious anti-borders agenda which has now been firmly rejected by the American public.
For years, polling has demonstrated the public’s discontent with the Biden Administration’s anti-border policies, and on election day the American people showed up to formalize their displeasure. The foundations of Democrats’ decisive defeat in the 2024 election were laid on the opening days of Joe Biden’s first term. In fact, on Biden’s very first day in office he ordered construction of the border wall terminated even though Congress had already appropriated the funding for it.
Biden also immediately announced a halt to all deportations after taking office, signaling to foreign nationals that the door to our country was open, and they could enter any way they like without facing any consequences. Predictably, these policies led to the worst border crisis in American history.
Since 2021, more than 10 million illegal aliens have come to the U.S., some of whom went on to murder and assault women, some more who were suspected terrorists, and many others who spent their time here trashing hotels and straining the budgets of cash-strapped cities after the Biden Administration invited them in. Trump ran on a platform of mass deportations, arguing that deporting large numbers of illegal aliens is necessary to restore the rule of law in America’s immigration system.
The president-elect’s detractors accused him and his allies of cruelty and racism in response. Clearly, the American people disagreed. On election night, every single border county in South Texas—which has borne the brunt of the Biden Administration’s border crisis—voted for Trump, despite a long history of supporting Democrats. Hispanic voters—who have spent years being inundated with propaganda from anti-borders activists and the media about the supposed racism of Trump and his supporters—gave Trump a larger share of their vote than any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. It turns out that Hispanic Americans—like the vast majority of Americans of all races—prefer a government willing to protect our sovereignty and put the needs of its citizens first over one that refuses to do so.
This is not to say that the immigration issue alone is what propelled Trump’s return to the White House. American families have been decimated by the impacts of inflation, and many of them likely voted with their pocketbooks in mind. However, it’s hard to imagine such a decisive victory would have been possible for the president-elect if he had not presented such a stark contrast on immigration with the current administration.
Given Trump’s previous term as president, the debates on this issue were not just hypotheticals, but based on the established records of both candidates. The American people trusted Trump to secure the border because they watched him do it during his first four years as president. In contrast, the public did not trust Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris because she has spent the last four years serving as vice president and “border czar” under the current administration. As Immigration Reform Law Institute Senior Fellow and former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan has said, Trump’s first administration created the most secure border situation in modern American history, and the Biden Administration immediately reversed his successful policies after coming into office. The American people voted as they did because they want not just a return to those policies, but an expansion of them. They want an end to the era of open borders and mass migration.
Poll after poll as well as the recent election results have demonstrated widespread support from the American people for a wall at the southern border, mass deportations of illegal aliens, and reasonable restrictions on large-scale legal immigration. Trump won this election in large part because he campaigned on these issues, and he now has a clear mandate to implement his ideas.
This does not mean doing so will be easy, as there will be widespread efforts by anti-borders groups to thwart the will of the people and block these necessary policies. The American Civil Liberties Union has already announced plans for a legal assault on the president-elect’s immigration policies, and more anti-borders groups are certain to follow. Those plans will be countered by attorneys from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, who fought to defend Trump’s immigration policies in his first term and will do so with even more vigor in the next four years.
The fight to restore America’s sovereignty is just beginning, but the election results made one thing clear: Voters want an immigration policy that puts America’s interests first, and will reward candidates for political office who campaign on border security and immigration restrictionism.
William J. Davis is a communications associate for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
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