President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies have induced so many immigrants to cross our southern border illegally that the Border Patrol cannot process them fast enough and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot keep track of where they go. That is the conclusion of a Government Accountability Office report released this week.
On day one of his administration, Biden ended former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. He also instituted a 100-day moratorium on deportations and stopped returning unaccompanied minors to Mexico through Title 42. Biden soon extended the Title 42 loophole to families as well.
TEXAS’S HANDS TIED WHEN IT COMES TO ENDING BORDER ‘INVASION,’ SAYS KEN PAXTON
The impact of Biden’s catch-and-release policies was swift and clear. Monthly apprehensions of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border rose from 73,994 in December 2020 to 173,277 in March 2021. As the GAO notes, for all of fiscal 2021, the arrest of illegal immigrants between ports of entry rose 300%.
This crush of humanity bursting across the southern border completely overwhelmed U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel and infrastructure. When an immigrant family is arrested for illegally crossing the border, it normally takes at least two hours for Border Patrol agents to interview them, fingerprint them, and issue them a “notice to appear” document that begins their deportation process. During this process, which takes years, virtually every immigrant will assert asylum as a defense against deportation. It will take a very long time for the process to work its course and, in nearly all cases, prove that these asylum claims are meritless.
With so many immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, the Border Patrol simply didn’t have the staff needed to process immigrants fast enough to prevent its facilities from becoming overcrowded.
So in March 2021, Biden officials at Border Patrol headquarters developed a new plan to process immigrants faster. Instead of an intensive two-hour process that resulted in an NTA, Border Patrol agents would spend only 30 minutes with each family and issue them a “notice to report” to an ICE field office near their stated destination. The Biden plan was essentially to shift the initial screening of immigrants from overwhelmed Border Patrol agents at the border to ICE field offices around the country.
Border Patrol officials on the southern border were instructed by headquarters to implement this new policy immediately without time for training on the new system. Biden’s top-down emergency plan, which was put in place with zero input from the officers who run it, went about as well as you would expect it to under the circumstances.
Tens of thousands of immigrants were released into the country without Border Patrol or ICE even knowing where they were going. Border Patrol has since changed its border processing system again, switching from an NTR system starting in mid-2021 to an “alternatives to detention” system by the end of 2021. Under the ATD system, an ICE agent would be stationed in Border Patrol facilities on the border to issue illegal immigrants an “A-number” to track them within the United States.
While the new ATD system did help ICE keep track of immigrants, it still did not fix the new problem of processing immigrants at ICE field offices. ICE field offices across the country are not designed to process hundreds of immigrants every day, nor does ICE have the trained staff to process them. As a result of these overwhelmed enforcement agencies, only half of all immigrant families arrested for illegally crossing the southern border have even begun the process of being prosecuted for deportation, at which time they can make their asylum claim. The other half are just floating about the country in an even deeper state of legal limbo.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
When the border crisis first started, Biden insisted it was only seasonal and would soon dissipate. Maybe Biden was so blinded by his open borders ideology that he didn’t want to know the truth. Maybe he was lying. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Biden caused a flood of illegal immigration at the southern border that has completely overwhelmed law enforcement agencies. And there is no end in sight.
If Republicans win the House and Senate this November, one of their top priorities must be to force Biden to end the border chaos he created — to reinstate Trump’s successful Remain in Mexico policy.
