President Joe Biden is preparing to reinstate yet another Trump-era immigration policy in an effort to tamp down some of the largest illegal immigration numbers in the history of the country. 

According to the New York Times, Biden is considering going back to the detention of illegal immigrant families, something he quickly ditched two years ago in favor of catch-and-release policies that have encouraged human trafficking and a flood of “families” to the border.

Biden and other Democrats had decried the policies as “inhumane,” but is it really inhumane to let traffickers pretend to be a family and send children to an awful fate inside the U.S.? I think not.

When Biden reversed the family detention policy, he sent the families into the country’s interior with flimsy monitoring via ankle bracelet or trackable cell phone. Trump’s previous detention policy for families disincentivized human trafficking because the traffickers would end up detained along with the children they sought to traffic into child labor or worse, prostitution and child pornography.

End of catch-and-release?

Hot Air pointed out that detaining families would effectively end catch and release, which would stop the flood of illegal immigrants into U.S. cities and towns. This is exactly why Trump did it in the first place, not just to be “mean” or something.

Biden has never seemed to understand the idea of talking softly and carrying a big stick–or in Trump’s case, talking loudly about the big stick so that would-be illegal immigrants decide it’s not worth it to come across the border.

He may be starting to slowly get the picture, however.

Besides the family detention idea, Biden has decided to revert to another Trump-era policy and reject all asylum claims from those who cross the border illegally. This policy allowed rapid deportation under Trump and sent the message that the U.S. was not going to be friendly to immigrants they caught trying to come across the border.

Losing thousands of immigrants

After a bit of a rough patch with illegal immigration, Trump quickly cracked down and had things much more under control when Biden came into office. Now, we have at least another 5 million-plus illegal immigrants floating around the country, ostensibly waiting for asylum hearings that could take years.

Many of them will disappear into the U.S., never to be heard from again since the Border Patrol went through a period of time where no tracking or record-keeping happened.

During that time, around 100,000 illegal immigrants were given notices to report to ICE, but around 47,000 of them never did, according to the Washington Examiner.

Now, they are tracked through cell phones issued by DHS, but those are also easy enough to ditch if immigrants find a way to survive inside the U.S. rather than be deported.

An eventual decision

Eventually, the government is going to have to decide what to do about an estimated 11 million total illegal immigrants inside the U.S., and some say that number could be as high as 25 million.

Democrats will be pushing for amnesty and voting rights, of course. That has been their end game all along.