Nearly 18 months since President Donald Trump ended the worst mass migration border crisis in American history, terabytes of government emails and records that could teach future generations why and how it happened await liberation.

The secrets in this trove beg discovery, exploitation and analysis about the great “Biden Border Crisis” that had millions of foreign nationals (at least 8 million) enter through the U.S. Southwest Border for 45 months between January 2021 and January 2025. Their value to the American national interest? Crucial knowledge that can prevent history from repeating.

But the referenced government material and the testimonies of involved government workers remain unstudied, the preventative value uncollected. That’s why Trump must appoint a presidential commission now that will establish a comprehensive official public record as to what happened.

THE BORDER IS CLOSED THANKS TO PRESIDENT TRUMP. IN VIRGINIA, THAT DOESN’T MATTER

The Trump administration is, of course, busy repairing the damage with mass deportations and policies to secure the southern border. But it must pause for the longer-range benefit of establishing this border crisis history before the opportunity to prevent the next big one is gone.

Why this, of all things, now?

The great mass migration crisis at the southwest border stands as a transformational event of lasting generational consequence. It affects all Americans in one form or another, beginning with having, by most accounts, decided the 2024 presidential election.

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Competing narratives about who carried out which border policies, as well as the ensuing crisis’s magnitude, range of costs and consequences, still fester without a foreseeable end along partisan lines, a permanent state of national dispute. That’s a major problem because history repeats itself when it is not studied, written, absorbed and referenced when needed.

The reason a commission must form now, before Trump leaves office in January 2029, is to ensure there is enough time for records excavators, analysts, researchers and writers to complete the job before a less amenable president enters office and the preventative learning opportunity is lost forever.

A presidential commission is the only option

For the last 150 years, relatively trusted presidential and congressional commissions have cleared the national air of damaging conspiracy theories and public disputes over consequential events in American life. Policymakers often found they could justify action when facts were supported by evidence and generally accepted.

Ideally for the Biden border crisis, Congress would establish a bipartisan commission such as the Warren Commission that examined the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Another example was the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which produced the famed report in 2004 that Congress followed as a guideline for major homeland security legislation.

Congress alone has ordered over 170 such commissions since 1989, according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report.

The chambers of Congress are too hopelessly fractured for bipartisan study today, so a presidential commission must be the option for this job. Presidents have ordered 45 such commissions over the decades.

It’s true that commissions can be wasteful, their suggestions sometimes ignored. The Hart-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 other commissions have mattered. They are still invoked as final authoritative reference guides about the controversial events of high public interest that birthed them. The U.S. presidential Tower Commission, for instance, investigated the Iran-Contra Affair, laying bare a vast secret foreign military venture during the Ronald Reagan administration.

The great mass migration crisis at the southwest border stands as a transformational event of lasting generational consequence. It affects all Americans in one form or another, beginning with having, by most accounts, decided the 2024 presidential election.

Years of stonewalling intact

A presidential truth commission is warranted for other sound reasons. The American public agrees on little about the crisis because the Biden administration frequently obstructed good information flow.

Throughout the administration’s four years, President Joe Biden, his staff, media outlets and prominent partisan pundits denied that anything was amiss at the border.

Official White House communications policy required Biden’s top talkers to say that nothing extraordinary was happening at the border. They’d call record-smashing border-crossing numbers a mere “challenge” and, in the face of video evidence and credible reporting, say, “The border is closed. The border is secure!” No top administration official, including Biden, would go anywhere near the border as 200,000 inadmissible aliens a month were pouring over it.

“It’s a seasonal thing … earthquakes, floods … lack of food. It’s because of gang violence and because of a whole range of things,” Biden once told reporters with a straight face in March 2021 when all-time national crossing records had just been broken. Such claims found traction in mainstream media outlets for all four years. When they eventually did acknowledge the crisis, Biden officials insisted it was disconnected from administration policies.

From beginning to end, the Biden administration sandbagged the release of data and information that would illuminate impacts on local public safety and national security.

Or the expense of it all. What did the crisis end up costing the American people to care for the millions who crossed and were released by design? Where did all the immigrants go afterward?

Lawmakers never got answers to information requests about how U.S. tax money helped United Nations agencies and migrant advocacy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) aid the illegal immigrant flows. How much did we give the resettlement industry, and what were our bureaucrats thinking as they cut checks?

The administration ignored barrages of information requests from Congress as well as Freedom of Information Act requests from reporters and public policy think tanks.

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Maybe a presidential commission can fill many of these requests as part of its work and use the data in a final report.

Migrants seen after getting off a plane in Westchester, New York, in October 2021. (New York Post/Christopher Sadowski)

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Too busy for a commission?

Most Americans understand that Trump is busy trying to achieve priorities – including some he may regard as central to his presidential legacy – that seem more urgent than forming a commission to study an event already in the rearview mirror.

But because none of its lessons were learned, yesterday’s crisis is very relevant to tomorrow. Appointing a commission before it’s too late is legacy stuff, because it might just spare America another one or two border catastrophes long after Trump is gone.