The Biden administration is airlifting migrants into the U.S. “to keep the border from spiraling out of control,” the head of a border patrol union told the Post in an exclusive interview, adding, “We hope there will be an amnesty program in the future.” “We look forward to it,” he added, in response to the millions of people who have entered the country since the president took office in January 2021.
“This is just a bait-and-switch,” Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said by phone from Texas. “They’re just paroling people through the airport instead of having them come across the border.”
“They’re going to keep the numbers around 5,000.” [border crossings per day]They’ll put people on parole and say, ‘Hey, we’ve reduced our numbers.”’ Even that number is “astronomical” compared to the Donald Trump and Barack Obama administrations, Judd added. He said that.
“We’re still five times where we should be,” he added, “but we’re still below the record number of arrests at our southern border.”
In January 2023, the Biden administration announced a program to allow thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to enter the country through a legal entry program known as “humanitarian parole.”
Since then, more than 386,000 immigrants have entered the United States as long as they have a sponsor and submit to a background check. This differs from the more than 85% of immigrants who regularly cross the border on foot.
February set a new record for the number of travelers apprehended at the Mexican border in a single month, with 189,922 people apprehended. This equates to an average of more than 6,500 people per day.
Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama Said In a 2019 interview with MSNBC, he said that just 1,000 illegal border crossings a day were “overwhelming the system.”
Entry numbers do not necessarily include parolees who can enter the United States directly on commercial flights. may remain Stay in the country for up to two years “on the basis of urgent humanitarian or important public interest reasons”.
Parolees are processed through CBP One, a mobile phone app that facilitates family reunification programs open to Colombians, Cubans, Ecuadorians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Haitians and Hondurans.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced In January, the agency announced that “approximately 413,300 individuals have successfully scheduled an appearance at a port of entry using CBP One.”
Congressional Republicans are calling on Biden to “halt” the flights, and Republican-run states are calling for a halt to the program, saying they are abusing a tool meant to be used only on a case-by-case basis. A lawsuit is being filed.
However, a Texas federal court dismissed the case on March 8, allowing the administration to continue making parole eligible for 30,000 immigrants each month.
House Republicans last month impeached Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for failing to enforce federal immigration laws and lying to Congress that the U.S. border was “secure.”
Officials in border states say the Biden administration’s immigration policies are undermining efforts to curb the influx of asylum seekers, even as authorities have spent billions of dollars to maintain order in communities. He says it’s hindering him.
“Texas spends billions of dollars as a state government,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told the Post while visiting Eagle Pass on Tuesday.
“And you have counties spending millions of dollars, and of course individual ranchers, farmers, private property owners, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect their properties.”
Local officials have told Blackburn they have been asking Blackburn to build more parts of the southern border wall for decades, but Judd said the administration needs to take “an infrastructure policy.” He said there is.
“You can go after fugitives, you can go after cartels, but you can’t stop asylum seekers. If you can’t stop asylum seekers, we’re all going to be doing administrative work, so we’re not going to go after asylum seekers. There will be no border patrol agents,” he said. “So they have to walk hand in hand.”
Judd said detaining single adults and accelerating a backlog of millions of asylum cases through a “first in, last out” policy is an incentive for migrants to cross the border, and that Mexican cartels are He suggested that this would weaken the incentive to buy and sell.
But Judd said he didn’t expect the administration to make any “drastic changes,” especially after Biden said he had done everything in his power and instead called on Congress to pass the bipartisan Senate border bill. He added that he had no expectations.
“There’s a lot of things he could do administratively, but he just refuses to do them because if he did that, he would basically be proven to be a liar,” Judd said. he said. “It was all about legal recourse for people who are already violating our laws.”
That will inevitably lead to “future amnesty programs” that will bring in about 8 million illegal immigrants living in the United States by the end of fiscal year 2024, Judd said.
“All you’re doing is inviting more people to come, so they can say, ‘Okay, all I have to do is come here and stay here for 10 years. “Because you understand that in the future you can also have a legal path,”’ he said. “That’s not going to work.”
The Biden administration will allow up to 4,000 immigrants a year to qualify if they have lived in the U.S. for 10 years, have not been convicted of a “serious crime,” and would “suffer an unusual and highly unusual hardship” if they were deported. He announced that he would be given a green card.
Immediately after taking office, the president called on Congress to pass a “comprehensive” bill. immigration reform bill This would open a path to U.S. permanent residence and citizenship for up to 11 million immigrants.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
