President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are building what critics call “Operation Ghost Mode” to make it easier for migrants to stay in the U.S. after being released from federal custody at the southern border.
The little-known pilot program, run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is aimed at reducing how often migrants released into the US interior from the border must appear at ICE field offices, people familiar with the matter told Breitbart News.
The program allows migrants to check in by cell phone or computer, rather than in person with an ICE agent as is the standard. Critics say a major flaw in the program is that ICE agents can’t get the GPS data of migrants who check in by computer.
Even more alarming, critics say, is that the program has yet to impose any penalties on immigrants who fail to check in with ICE officials on their phones or computers.
“It’s bad enough allowing millions of illegal immigrants into our country, but now Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are allowing released illegal immigrants to go into ‘ghost mode,’ making it nearly impossible for ICE agents to track them down if they flee in the future,” RJ Howman, president of the National Center for Immigration Enforcement (NICE), told Breitbart News.
Even if ICE agents obtain GPS data when migrants check in with their cell phones, the data is only stored for a week and is useless if agents need to locate migrants weeks, months or years later, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fewer than 150 immigrants are currently registered, but Homeland Security officials have purchased enough capacity to register 100,000, according to a person familiar with the program. Security breaches and the program’s inability to fully register with Android phones have caused headaches for the department.
John Fehr of the Center for Immigration Studies, who worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under former President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News that programs that allow immigrants to avoid in-person interviews with ICE agents are a “national security risk.”
“The effort to eliminate in-person check-ins acknowledges that our porous border overburdens ICE,” Fehr said. “The Administration should work to increase the number of ICE agents, but the Administration has allowed millions of largely unknown people to enter the country and is now scaling back surveillance of these people, which will undoubtedly undermine public safety.”
ICE officials are frustrated with the program because they were given little involvement in the construction, despite being tasked with the work, according to people familiar with the matter.
Instead, critics describe the plan as a fantasy of anti-enforcement political appointees who want to keep immigrants in the United States indefinitely.
“ICE is a law enforcement agency, not a Silicon Valley startup,” Howman said. “ICE agents want to focus on arresting, detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, not on housing illegals.”
The program is one of a few pilot initiatives being implemented by the Biden-Harris administration.
The most controversial pilot program is Biden and Harris’s effort to issue ID cards to migrants who cross the border and are released onto US soil, with the aim of making it easier for them to pass through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening at airports.
Although DHS has not yet started issuing the ID cards, the program has already cost about $3 million and is expected to register about 10,000 immigrants.
Similarly, last year the Biden-Harris administration proposed a “Release and Reporting Management (RRM)” program in which migrants released into the U.S. would check in electronically with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers just once a year.
The RRM was pushed by political appointees but has been put on hold at DHS.
Critics told Breitbart News that deportation and detention should be the top priority of any ICE-led program. Under the Biden-Harris administration, for example, the federal government remains severely limited in detention space to hold the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrive at the border each month.
Meanwhile, only a small fraction of migrants released at the border are placed into monitoring programs, with the vast majority receiving little or no monitoring at all.
“Biden and Harris should put the safety of Americans first and end this ghost mode operation,” Howman said. “ICE needs more deportation officers and prosecutors, along with serious investments in detention space.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter. here.
