U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced last month that they had encountered more than 180,000 people attempting to enter the country from Mexico in May, the most in more than two decades.

Republicans have seized on the issue of immigration this year, as public officials such as Sen. Rick Scott and Pasco County U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis have both made stops at the southern border. 

As have a couple of GOP congressional candidates running in the Bay area in 2022: Christine Quinn, who ran against Democrat Kathy Castor in Hillsborough County in 2016 and 2020 and intends to challenge her again next year, and Amanda Makki, who ran for the Pinellas County CD 13 seat last year and announced this week that she will do so again in 2022.

Quinn says she doesn’t believe that Americans are getting “the true story” about the issues at the border from the politicians or the media, hence her relatively impromptu visit to McAllen, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley in March. 

“The problem is that the message has gotten around to South American and spread around the world that ‘Biden’s opened the borders,'’ so these people think that they can just come across,” she told Spectrum Bay News 9 on Wednesday. “He’s given them false hope.”

The current president has changed “numerous border and asylum policies implemented by the Trump administration,” the Wall Street Journal reported in May, but the migrant surge appears to be multifaceted.  POLITICO reported in April that “people on the ground in Mexico” suggest that the surge is due to President Biden’s maintaining the near-complete cutting off of asylum, which is a form of legal immigration. 

That policy, known as Title 42 that was implemented by then-President Trump in March of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic first began, requires that single adults be immediately sent back to Mexico. That policy has been maintained by the Biden administration. The Trump administration stopped applying Title 42 to unaccompanied minors last fall following a federal court ruling, and the Biden administration has continued to allow minors into the U.S., where they live in shelters run by the Dept. of Health and Human Services (the ACLU has contended that the Biden administration's use of Title 42 is "illegal"). 

Amanda Makki visited Luna County, New Mexico, earlier this month, where construction of the border wall was halted earlier this year (you can see Makki’s video of her visit here).

“Americans are worried because this is not just something that’s just going to affect border communities, it affects everyone,” she said earlier this week. “It affects every community, when you’re just one Greyhound bus ticket away when they get across the border. When they’re just one Greyhound bus ticket away from being in any community in the United States. And that’s what’s scary about this.”

“These people who have crossed the border illegally are here in Tampa,” Quinn adds. “They’re looking for jobs. They’re looking for a place to go. They’re going to go anywhere they can in the whole United States.”

Although the congressional midterm election is more than a year away, running on a platform opposing the Biden administration’s handling of the immigration issue certainly makes sense, at least according to one major poll.

A majority of Americans (51 percent) disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the situation at the U.S. – Mexico border, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on the 4^thof July, including 90 percent of Republicans. Only 33 percent say they approve of how he is handling the issue.

“It has been a very, very significant Republican issue,” says Florida International University politics and international relations professor Eduardo Gamarra. “Not to mention the fact that it’s probably been one of their more successful talking points. This is an issue that has worked well for them during elections.”

Gamarra also says that the Republican Party is a Donald Trump party, where immigration politics has always been at the forefront. “Representatives in districts that may not even have a very significant immigrant population are taking this as a big issue," he says.

Makki says she’s not looking at the politics of the issue.

“Joe Biden has no plan in place for building the wall. He will not reinstate President Trump’s policies that worked. In March of 2020, there were 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children at the border, In March of 2021, there were 19,000. Clearly, there’s a crisis, and he’s not doing anything about it,” she said. 

Quinn said she found her trip in March to the Rio Grande Valley to be “enlightening” and intends to return again.

“It is a crisis," she says. "We must deal with this crisis because at the end of the day, nobody is illegal. They’re human beings. They’ve just illegally entered the United States Right? And that’s the takeaway. We have to look at this situation for what it really is. These people are looking for freedom.”