Now they tell us. President Biden’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, P.J. Lechleitner, is grousing that the commander in chief “absolutely” should have acted sooner on border security and curbing the flood of migrants into America. Those regrets follow Secretary Yellen’s lament that the Biden administration’s overspending on Covid stimulus contributed to the inflation spiral that saw prices surge some 20 percent since 2021.

Where, though, were Mr. Lechleitner and Ms. Yellen when we needed them? In the end it was the voters who on Election Day rendered their verdict on the Biden record. By that point, the proverbial horse was out of the barn and halfway across the corn, and the damage was already done. If these top officials had piped up sooner, one can imagine that America could have been spared some of the havoc wrought by Mr. Biden’s policy disasters. 

In terms of immigration, one of Mr. Biden’s first moves was to reverse President Trump’s tough border policies, which had helped to curb the flood of illegal migration that had plagued America for decades. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, for one, helped to scale back on false claims of asylum by migrants who have been gaming America’s generous system that historically has aimed to help those who are fleeing legitimate persecution and tyranny.

Too often in recent years, though, migrants have been invoking the asylum process without justification. Yet border patrol agents lack the authority to dismiss these false asylum claims out of hand. Instead, migrants are released into America with court dates years away. It’s made a mockery of America’s heritage as a haven for refugees and freedom-seekers. Only some 15 percent of asylum claims typically get vindicated in court, per the Justice Department.

Mr. Biden’s lax policies are one reason why illegal migration surged on his watch to some five million, helping to bring the percent of foreign-born Americans to a record high of 15.2 percent, the New York Times has reported. Mr. Lechleitner, who became ICE’s acting head in July 2023, now tells NBC News he regrets his agency didn’t do more to prevent the influx. The scale of the numbers, he says, meant ICE couldn’t “do our own core mission adequately.” 

The president, in Mr. Lechleitner’s telling, “should have moved faster” to curb the crisis. In the end, Mr. Biden didn’t act to toughen border policies until June 2024, when it had become clear that the border was emerging as a major electoral liability for Democrats. The damage had been done, though, with top Democratic senators after the election conceding the party had committed “political malpractice” by neglecting border security.

Ms. Yellen’s crocodile tears over inflation are another case of too little, too late, after she and Mr. Biden presided over a wave of inflation not seen since the Stagflation of the 1970s. The mistake took place in early 2021 when the president and Democrats in Congress, faced with an economy that was already recovering from the Covid pandemic, decided to lavish an additional $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending, courtesy of the taxpayers. 

Adding fuel to the inflationary fire were the high-regulating,  high-tax, high-spending Biden-Harris administration policies. Yet warnings from Republicans were ignored and Ms. Yellen — along with Mr. Biden and the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell — waved off the inflation fears by noting that the initial signals of price increases were “transitory.” That scoffing ceased when inflation hit 9.1 percent, the highest level seen in generations, in June 2022. 

Now Ms. Yellen is offering what amounts to an apology, conceding that all the Covid relief spondulix “may have contributed a little bit to the inflation.” Reuters calls her equivocation a “rare concession by Biden administration officials about the role their policies played in driving up prices.” More candor from the White House on migration and inflation is welcome — even as a broader reckoning with Mr. Biden’s policy errors awaits the next president.