Nogales, Arizona is a quintessential border town.

It’s a unique spot that blends the strip malls and big box supermarkets of the continental United States with the adobe-built homes complete with chicken coops that are found throughout northern Mexico.

Nogales is a fusion of a place that’s both U.S. and Mexico simultaneously, a town that’s the beneficiary of daily cross-border trade and cultural commerce.

And earlier this year, just a few miles to the east of the heavily patrolled port of entry between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico, I saw a physical manifestation of the Biden administration’s broken policy towards dealing with our nation’s borders.

I was in Arizona at the beginning of February to examine the border crisis firsthand before announcing my run for U.S. Senate from New Jersey as a Republican.

My first day in Arizona was unseasonably cold, rainy and windy. Trudging through mid-winter mud and bracing rain in the shadow of completed sections of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, I spoke to Border Patrol agents on duty. In their distinctive white and green SUVs, they stood lonely guard, monitoring the quiet, wind-swept mountains between two nations for trespassers who weren’t showing up on that side of town, migrants who knew far better than to try and summit the sturdy, completed steel wall there.

Go east, these Border Patrol agents told me. Just past the industrial park. You’ll know what to look for.

What I found the following day was unforgettable.

In between sections of secure, completed border fence standing at least 20 feet high, topped off with razor wire, I saw a massive, yawning gap in our nation’s security. In that space, there’s a 60-foot hole in the border wall, plus uncompleted lower sections of wall that make a mockery of the term "border security," allowing people to easily stroll from Mexico into our country.

Originally meant for this location was a piece of the border wall that had been slated for completion in January of 2021. But with the change in presidential administrations, it quickly became the first casualty of newly inaugurated President Biden’s orders to stop wall construction.

I saw young men among the groups of people streaming into the United States with impunity. And the well-worn path through a grove of trees indicated that many others had done so before, and more would again.

It’s a metaphor for how irresponsible the Biden administration has been on border security. And with a new policy this week which owes far more to electoral math than constitutional clarity, Biden has created a situation where those who break the law by getting into the U.S. courtesy of his gap in the border wall could eventually receive the benefits of American citizenship.

This week, under the guise of performative humanity and facing the risk of losing the support of his base in an election year, the President has again doubled down on his consistently terrible policy decisions regarding the border.

Biden’s new immigration policy is a mistake. It is a gimmick, it does an end run around the Constitution, it does not stop migrants currently coming across the border, and it incentivizes more law-breaking in the future.

The President’s policy threatens to undermine our national security, exacerbate the border crisis, and sets a dangerous, unconstitutional precedent for the future. The plan is reckless and foolish.

I do not believe individuals brought to the United States before they were old enough to successfully tie their shoes are culpable for breaking the law. And beyond this President, there is bi-partisan, transnational blame on the immigration issue that goes back decades and makes up many of the reasons why the border crisis has become so acute now.

But let’s not allow Biden to fool us: these executive actions are not about hard-working family members or good neighbors who are here today. They aren’t about a pathway to citizenship for some currently living alongside us. In the long run, they’re about preparing the way for large-scale amnesty that will likely be on the agenda if the President is re-elected and Democrats take control of the House of Representatives this fall.

The President’s orders do not take into account the root causes of mass migration. They don’t have common sense at their core. And they don’t add a sole immigration judge or Border Patrol agent, both categories of which are sorely needed to secure and enforce our borders.

Yet we could have seen this coming.

In January 2014, President Barack Obama said on immigration policy: "I've got a pen and I've got a phone…and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions."

Now over 10 years later, Obama’s successor in the Oval Office has copied far more than his predecessor’s stable of underqualified advisors. Both men have continued to expand the size and wield the power of an executive branch that long ago passed the ceremonial, nearly clerical role the Founding Fathers intended presidents to have.

Regardless of which party controls the House and Senate, the legislative branch is in Article One of our Constitution because the Founders assigned that branch primacy. As dysfunctional as Congress may seem, this is how the Founders wanted our government of laws and principles to work. Change on a large scale can be frustratingly slow, but the slow speed is also a safeguard against tyranny.

Any policy that subverts the people’s directly elected representatives for purely political gain should be seen as an outrage. President Biden is risking our security while he’s also degrading the Constitution.

At the beginning of the White House event Tuesday unveiling the new executive actions, the First Lady said the President is “leading the way with compassion and experience.”

Compassion is not an asset if it risks our national principles while throwing constitutional caution to the wind.

And experience serves no one when it’s learned all the wrong lessons.

Clarity is needed to fix our nation’s broken borders.

Biden’s new immigration policy is a craven, calculated and glaring error. Beyond this executive action, it’s time Congress reclaimed a place as the primary driver of national policy to put a check on outrageous oversteps by this President — and future Presidents. There are few more urgent issues to take the lead on than finally making our country’s borders secure.

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Alex Zdan, an investigative journalist and GOP strategist. He sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from New Jersey earlier this year.