Biden’s border crisis migrates north as record number of illegal immigrants enter US

“Everybody in this area is on edge,” said a resident along the New York-Canadian border.

Katie Daviscourt Seattle WA

May 21, 2023

Illegal immigration crossings have skyrocketed across the US/Northern border along Canada with authorities reporting that Border Patrol agents have seen a drastic increase in encounters compared to last fiscal year.

According to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol agents encountered 4,827 illegal immigrants at the US/Canadian border between October 2022 and April 2023, compared to 2,238 encounters for all of fiscal year 2022, Daily Caller reports.

Border Patrol says that while agents have seen a more than double increase in encounters in the first seven months of fiscal year 2023, 2,458 of those encounters were illegal immigrants from Mexico, according to the outlet.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s lax border policies grants Mexicans the authority to fly into the country with electronic travel authorizations, which can be easily obtained with the low price of $7.00. They do not have to present visas, granting them easy access to the northern nation.

National Border Patrol Council President Sean Walsh warned about the increase in illegal crossings along the north, telling Daily Caller that, “The northern border is less secure than it ever has been and the security speaks for itself.”

“If we’re losing twelve times the amount of people just in this fiscal year alone than in the whole last year, the cartels and criminal organizations have taken advantage and exploited the border and this administration’s policies or lack of policies to address security,” Walsh said, who oversees the Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire sector of the northern border.

The increase in illegal crossings have residents living in northern border towns concerned and questioning what the future could look like if President Joe Biden and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau fail to take necessary measures to ensure the safety of both Americans and Canadians.

“Everybody in this area is on edge,” Dan Cowan, a resident along the New York-Canadian border, told Daily Caller.

“We don’t have the holding capacity for Border Patrol or US Customs. What are they gonna do with these people when they’re getting here? They’re not deporting them,” Cowan explained.

The state of New York has recently declared a state of emergency as illegal immigrants pour into the Big Apple after illegally crossing into the US from Mexico.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been struggling to contain the mass influx of illegal immigrants and has been transporting them to northern towns in Orange County and Rockland County in Upstate New York, specifically the city of Newburgh, which had hotels evict homeless veterans to make room for illegal immigrants.

In October, the Democrat Mayor declared a state of emergency and requested $1 billion in aid from the Biden administration to help with assistance. Mayor Adams asked a judge last week to revoke the city’s “sanctuary status.”

Reference: https://thepostmillennial.com/bidens-border-crisis-migrates-north-as-record-number-of-illegal-immigrants-enter-us

Did Joe Biden Lose 85,000 Migrant Kids?

Two outrages: ORR director doesn’t know, and most of the media doesn’t seem to care

Watch Video Updates from the U.S. – Mexico Border

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The House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee held a hearing this week on the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Unaccompanied Alien Children Program. Robin Dunn Marcos, director of the office, appeared, but if you watch that hearing you’ll learn a lot more from the questions than the answers — because there weren’t many answers on key issues, such as the fate of 85,000 children the office has apparently lost contact with. Someone needs to put a up a large “Help Wanted” sign in Washington, because the American people are desperately in need of accountability on migrant children — both in the government and in the media.

“Unaccompanied Alien Children”.

Until late 2002, unaccompanied alien children or “UACs” were not really a thing. That’s not to say that the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — precursor to CBP and ICE in immigration enforcement and to USCIS in adjudicating immigration benefits — did not encounter, process, and in cases detain alien kids without parents or guardians. It did.

And it often received criticism for how it did so. In 1985, two organizations sued the INS on behalf of alien children being detained by the agency. The purpose of the suit, as NPR has explained, was to “challeng[e] procedures regarding the detention, treatment, and release of children”.

That case went through several levels of judicial review, including by the Supreme Court in March 1993 on the question of whether the then-controlling regulation limiting the release of those children without parents or guardians violated the constitution’s Due Process clause.

That regulation provided for the release of UACs only to their parents, close relatives, or legal guardians, “except in unusual and compelling circumstances”. If not released under this provision, an INS official was required to find “suitable placement … in a facility designated for the occupancy of juveniles.”

Justice Scalia, writing for six other justices, found that the regulation was not unconstitutional. He noted:

The parties to the present suit agree that the Service must assure itself that someone will care for those minors pending resolution of their deportation proceedings. That is easily done when the juvenile’s parents have also been detained and the family can be released together; it becomes complicated when the juvenile is arrested alone, i. e., unaccompanied by a parent, guardian, or other related adult.

The matter was remanded to U.S. district court, and in January 1997, the Clinton DOJ and the plaintiffs entered into a stipulated settlement agreement (the Flores settlement agreement, or FSA).

The FSA governed the conditions of detention and release of unaccompanied children in INS custody, but it never satisfied the advocates. When the INS was abolished and DHS created in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA), they had the chance to act.

A Democratic amendment to HSA defined the term “unaccompanied alien child” as:

a child who — (A) has no lawful immigration status in the United States; (B) has not attained 18 years of age; and (C) with respect to whom — (i) there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States; or (ii) no parent or legal guardian in the United States is available to provide care and physical custody.

That amendment also gave responsibility for the care and placement of those UACs to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

There was little debate when this amendment was approved, so it’s unclear why anybody thought that ORR would do a better job with those kids than the former INS had, or as the future ICE — which has authority to detain aliens generally — would do.

In any event, the change was not that significant at first, because DHS didn’t encounter many UACs to transfer. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the number of UACs DHS referred to ORR in the early 2000s “averaged 6,700 annually”.

That quickly changed in 2008, however, when congressional Democrats pushed through the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA).

Section 235 of the TVPRA divided UACs into two groups: (1) children from the “contiguous” countries of Canada and Mexico; and (2) minor nationals of “non-contiguous” countries (everywhere else).

Under that provision, a UAC from a contiguous country can be returned home if the child has not been trafficked and does not have a credible fear of return.

UACs from non-contiguous countries, however, must be transferred to ORR within 72 hours and placed into formal removal proceedings (UACs can’t be placed into expedited removal), even if they have not been trafficked and have no fear of return. ORR is then directed to place most of those children with “sponsors” in the United States.

That created an opening for parents, other family members, guardians, and traffickers in the United States interested in bringing children living in those “non-contiguous” countries to do so, urged by smugglers with their own agendas.

That is my perspective, at least, but take a look at the statistics and decide for yourself: According to CRS, in FY 2008, the fiscal year before TVPRA took effect, CBP encountered fewer than 10,000 UACs at the Southwest border.

By FY 2009, when that bill was signed, that figure rose to around 20,000 UACs, 82 percent of them Mexican nationals, and just 17 percent from the non-contiguous “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The number of UACs entering illegally kept growing thereafter, with Border Patrol apprehending more than 68,500 of them in FY 2014. By that point, however, just 23 percent of UACs came from Mexico and 77 percent from the Northern Triangle.

Faced with a surge in “non-contiguous” UACs that year, President Obamadesperately wrote to Congress, asking it to provide DHS with “additional authority to exercise discretion in processing the return and removal of unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador” — that is, to fix section 235 of TVPRA. That did not happen.

The Hottest Button.

Immigration has become a “hot button” issue on Capitol Hill — right up there with gun control and abortion — although as my colleague George Fishmanrecently explained, members reached bipartisan accord on it as recently as 2005. And as a subset, the treatment of UACs has become the hottest button.

Obama knew that fixes were needed, but even he could not convince Congress to do anything to bring that about, and not even stunning Senate reports in 2016 and 2018 on ORR failures forced a change.

Instead of legislative action, various parties — including most notably Joe Biden — have decided to demagogue the issue for political advantage. Let me explain.

The Trump administration attempted to address the UAC issue through any number of administrative actions, including “a biometric and biographic information-sharing agreement between ORR and DHS … intended to ensure greater child safety and immigration enforcement”. That vetting took time, however, and by FY 2020, UACs were spending on average 102 days in ORR custody while that office found a suitable sponsor in the United States.

Trump had left himself vulnerable on the issue of alien children, however, due to a poorly implemented 2018 plan (“zero tolerance”) to prosecute alien adults who had brought children with them when they entered illegally in “family units” (FMUs) for “improper entry” (a misdemeanor federal offense).

When the adults in those FMUs were sent to U.S. Marshal’s Service custody for prosecution, the children were deemed “unaccompanied” and sent to ORR — a process derided as “family separation” by Trump’s legion of detractors. The plan was poorly implemented (and more poorly explained), prompting a firestorm in the press.

Trump had to quickly shut zero tolerance down, but by then the damage had been done. Anything he tried to do thereafter relating to migrant children — including a plea for additional funding to move UACs out of overcrowded CBP processing centers and into ORR shelters in the spring of 2019 — was twisted in the increasingly hostile press and played for outrage by Congress.

That 2019 crisis led to the “kids in cages” trope, in which the public was almost categorically led to believe that UACs were sitting in squalor in government detention because Trump wanted to abuse them, and not because Congress refused to provide funding.

Then-candidate Biden issued various position papers on his immigration plans, but he only highlighted — and the press only focused on — his promises to eliminate the cages and reunify separated families. Here’s how he stated it, at the top of his campaign’s immigration website:

It is a moral failing and a national shame when … children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers and the government seeks to keep them there indefinitely. When our government argues in court against giving those children toothbrushes and soap. When President Trump uses family separation as a weapon against desperate mothers, fathers, and children seeking safety and a better life.

When I say “the press only focused on”, consider that there was only one immigration question asked during the 2020 presidential debates between Biden and Trump, from Kristen Welker at NBC News:

Mr. President, your administration separated children from their parents at the border, at least 4000 kids, You’ve since reversed your zero tolerance policy, but the United States can’t locate the parents of more than 500 children. So how will these families ever be reunited?

Trump did himself no favors in response, fumbling his answer and deflecting by asking Biden “who built the cages?”

Biden Rides In. Biden then rode into office promising to reunite those families (and attempting to use Border Patrol and ICE funds to do so, although curiously separation reportedly continues under his administration), and to move UACs out of ORR custody as quickly as possible.

That all led to a brand-new UAC surge, which has eclipsed the one Obama faced in 2014. In March 2021 alone, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended more than 16,000 non-contiguous UACs — five times as many as in the prior December.

That forced Biden to open up “temporary” shelters known as “emergency intake sites”, or “EIS”. Advocates soon complained about the conditions in those EIS, and by April Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) was threatening to shut down the one in San Antonio, calling in the Texas Rangers (a component of the state’s Department of Public Safety), to investigate what was going on there.

By March 2022, it was revealed that ORR had lost 20,000 of the UACs it had released to sponsors under Biden, and complaints about EIS were amplified last September when the HHS Office of Inspector General issued a blistering report on the office’s failures in keeping track of children in its care and vetting potential sponsors.

Though honestly, “amplified” is likely the wrong word. Aside from me and a few congressional staffers, few if any in the media noticed what was going on, even as Biden began cutting corners in vetting potential UAC sponsors, including by revoking Trump’s biometric and biographic information-sharing agreement between ORR and DHS.

By April 17, according to HHS, “the average length of time an unaccompanied child remained in ORR’s care was 25 days”.

This only changed when the New York Times started running a series of exposés on released UACs who were being forced into grueling labor and hardship in February.

Oversight Hearing.Which brings me to this week’s hearing. Among the key takeaways were that only about 37 percent of released UACs end up with a parent, and that about two-thirds of them are working full-time jobs (often without work authorization). Respectfully, if the Biden administration believes that there is a worker shortage in the United States, migrant kids in sweatshops aren’t the solution.

Shockingly, however, Director Dunn Marcos could not (or would not) confirm in response to questioning by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) that her office had lost contact with “85,000 kids” it had released to sponsors. All she could say was that in 81 percent of post-release follow-up safety and welfare calls, ORR was able to make contact with the child. Meaning that in about one-fifth of UAC cases, ORR lost contact.

All procedural arguments are self-serving, but Chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) was spot-on when he went off script to complain:

It’s particularly aggravating to see these kids come across the border and have the press not cover what’s going on, when these kids may never see their parents again, and just a few years ago we saw the press screaming about broken families.

Compare whatever coverage you may see about Rep. Biggs’ questioning on 85,000 UACs to the following report from the Washington Post in May 2018, during the Trump administration:

During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, testified that the federal agency had lost track of 1,475 children who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own (that is, unaccompanied by adults) and subsequently were placed with adult sponsors in the United States. As the Associated Press reported, the number was based on a survey of more than 7,000 children:

From October to December 2017, HHS called 7,635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6,075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS.

Let me do the math for you. The AP report referenced showed HHS reached 79.5 percent of UACs it had released during three months in 2017 but could not contact 1,475 of them.

Dunn Marcos asserted that her office had been able to reach 81 percent of UACs it released but couldn’t even confirm that it was unable to contact 85,000 others.

The difference between 79.5 percent and 81 percent is 1.5 percent — basically a rounding error.

The difference between 85,000 and 1,475, however, is 83,525 — more lost kids than are enrolled in the Austin (Texas) Independent School District — America’s 41st largest. If somehow someone had lost every student in Austin’s public schools, every outlet would cover it like CNN covered the first Gulf War. Biggs’ unanswered contention? Crickets.

Did I mention that the headline on the May 2018 Post article was “The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now”? In that vein, where’s the outrage now?

I’m not saying the press should have cut Donald Trump slack on migrant kids. “Politics ain’t beanbag”, and in many ways he did himself few favors. But if the media isn’t solely composed of partisan hacks playing gotcha on such children, they should be as enraged about 85,000 lost kids now as they were about a fraction of that number in 2018. They aren’t — and that’s the true outrage.

Reference: cis.org

https://cis.org/Arthur/Did-Joe-Biden-Lose-85000-Migrant-Kids

ALL DEMOCRAT’s on the committee are PULLING OUT of the FIELD HEARING about the BORDER CRISIS in Texas on Wednesday

BREAKING: House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep Mark Green tells us he has just learned all Democrats on the committee are pulling out from attending a field hearing about the border crisis in Texas on Wednesday. He says that’s despite several Dems confirming attendance, & inviting their own minority witness, who is confirmed on the federal panel.
US Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz is also set to testify. Chairman Green says he was given no reason for the abrupt pullout. Chairman Green’s statement below. #FoxNews

Homeland Security committee Dems confirm that they will not be attending the border hearing

They say that they never agreed to attend in the first place so they are not “pulling out.”

It’s time America takes ACTION! SPEAK UP!

Call: Rep Mark Green’s office 202-224-3121 (Capitol switchboard)

Speak to the staff of ranking committee chair, this gets your message to him directly…. otherwise, our voices are diluted 🇺🇸

STATEMENT from Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D):

“After careful consideration, Committee Democrats have decided not to participate in the Republicans’ field hearing this week. Unfortunately, it has become clear that Republicans planned to politicize this event from the start, breaking with the Committee’s proud history of bipartisanship. Instead of a fact-finding mission to develop better border security and immigration policies, Republicans are traveling to the border to attack the Administration and try to score political points with their extreme rhetoric – despite having voted against the resources border personnel need. Committee Democrats are in regular contact with Department leadership and stakeholders on the ground and will be taking substantive site visits to the border – including as soon as this week.”

The Biden Border plan is to shift illegal immigration from mass numbers of illegal aliens rushing the border to paroling or releasing those same illegal aliens into the United States with employment authorization and access to welfare, preparing the illegals for eventual de facto or legislative amnesty. The legislative amnesty is off the table with the Republican House, but the de facto amnesty remains in play.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Imagine it! All this is allowed by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Biden Regime Administrative Amnesty hangs by a thread, though. The numbers of illegal aliens continue to increase, the parole or catch-and-release amnesty has been declared illegal by a Federal District Court judge in Florida, so the only way for the Biden Regime to survive the border crisis is to lie.

The Luge press’s is only too happy to run cover for the lies. Just a few days ago the Lying Press, Associated Press in this case, touted that the numbers of border crossers is down significantly, as if the announcements of the parole amnesty convinced millions of illegal aliens enroute through Central America or flying into Mexico from Africa, Asia, and South America to just return home and try and use the app to enter, rather than try their luck at the border. Actually, luck has nothing to do with it; coyotes who work for the cartels have guaranteed entry to the United States, no matter how many attempts it takes.

A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.

A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows some support for changing the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers allowed into the country. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say the level of immigration and asylum-seekers should be lowered, while about 2 in 10 say they should be higher, according to the poll. About a third want the numbers to remain the same.

The decrease in border crossings followed Biden’s announcement in early January that Mexico would take back Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans under a pandemic-era rule that denies migrants the right to seek asylum as part of an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, the U.S. agreed to admit up to 30,000 a month of those four nationalities on humanitarian parole if they apply online, enter at an airport and find a financial sponsor.

[Plunge In Border Crossings Could Blunt GOP Attack On Biden, by Elliot Spagat, AP, March 7, 2023]

Instead, the reality is that the Fiscal Year 2023 is heading to break the record of illegal immigration from the last two fiscal years, when over 5 million illegal aliens entered or attempted to enter the United States, with most being released into the United States.

Migrant encounters at the southern border have already surpassed the one million mark for Fiscal Year 2023, multiple Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources tell Fox News, marking an unprecedented pace for encounters.

As of Friday, the total migrant encounters at the border were at 1,008,217 for the fiscal year, which began in October. Of those, 87.8% were single adults. Just 328,454 were expelled under Title 42 — the pandemic-era protocol that allows border agents to rapidly expel border crossers.

There were more than 1.7 million encounters overall in FY 2021 and over 2.3 million in FY 2022. The first months of FY 2023 have outpaced those of the prior fiscal year. This time last year, numbers for FY22 through March 1 were 839,819—well under the 1 million mark.

Meanwhile, there have been 354,522 known “gotaways”—illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol agents but have been detected on another form of surveillance. In FY 2022, there were nearly 600,000 gotaways.

[Migrant Encounters At Southern Border Hit 1,000,000 Mark For FY 2023, Outpacing Prior Year: Sources, by Adam Shaw, Fox News, February 25, 2023]

One may argue that the last few days have educated the illegal aliens and the numbers are dropping. But sadly for the Biden Regime and the Lying Press, reality has struck, and badly. Illegal aliens for whom the CBP One app is not available or not working have decided they are coming in, by hook or by crook, but mostly by violence. In fact, they are reverting to the common tactic that appeared during the early Clinton Regime, rushing the Ports-of-Entry (POE), the facilities where pedestrians and motor vehicles enter the United States from Mexico. Such tactics began in the 90s, but occasionally happened more recently as well under the Obama Regime and the Trump Administration.

Biden admin pressured Dem El Paso mayor not to declare state of emergency over city’s migrant crisis

The White House pressured the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, to not declare a state of emergency over the city’s migrant crisis due to fear it would make President Biden look bad, The Post has learned.

At least three of the El Paso City Council’s eight members have urged Mayor Oscar Leeser to issue an emergency declaration in response to the thousands of migrants who’ve filled the city’s shelters and are being housed in local hotels, sources familiar with the matter said.

But Leeser admitted during a private phone conversation last month that he’d been directed otherwise by the Biden administration, one of the officials told The Post.

“He told me the White House asked him not to,” Council member Claudia Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez also said Leeser has repeatedly assured her that he’d declare a state of emergency “if things got worse” — without saying what that meant.

US Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), whose district covers rural areas and border towns near El Paso, also said he heard similar accounts from other city officials.

“It is a sleight of hand what the administration is doing — pressuring the local government to not issue a declaration of emergency, to say as if everything is going OK,” he said.

Gonzales also alleged that the White House has done “the same thing in other parts of my district,” which have also seen huge numbers of migrants seeking refuge.

Leeser declined to speak with The Post but said in a prepared statement, “I don’t bow to pressure from any side.”

At one point over 2,100 migrants were crossing the border at El Paso daily.

New York Post

“I make decisions based on current circumstances and in the best interest of the citizens of El Paso,” the statement said.

Leeser also praised the federal government for providing his city with “critical” assistance.

The White House pressured El Paso’s mayor to not declare a State of Emergency over the city’s migrant crisis.
New York Post

Congressman Tony Gonzales shares it was not the first time they’ve received pressure regarding migrants seeking refuge.
Congressman Tony Gonzalez

At a Sept. 27 City Council meeting, Mayor Leeser also addressed the issue, saying Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) had urged him not to declare a State of Emergency, adding: “The White House has asked, at this point, for us not to do that and they’ll continue to work with us and continue to give us … money through [the] Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Figures posted on El Paso’s official website show the city has received only $2 million in federal reimbursements toward the $8 million it has spent dealing with the migrant crisis.

The total cost could end up being much more, with ElPasomatters.org reporting in September the city was spending as much as $300,000 a day to shelter, feed and transport asylum-seeking immigrants.

In May, The Post first reported how officials in El Paso were considering declaring a state of emergency ahead of the expected ending of pandemic-related expulsions of border-crossers under Title 42 of the federal Public Health Services Act.

The move would have made the city and county eligible for state and federal funding to open additional shelters for housing migrants.

But the following day, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said that “the mayor and I backed off,” telling The Post that “we found out that there’s very little difference between the funding we’re getting now and the funding that we would get if it went up to the governor and the governor sent it to President Biden.”

At the time, about 700 migrants a day were arriving in El Paso.

But that number topped 2,100 a day last week before dropping down to around 1,600 a day, according to the latest information posted Monday on the city’s website.

Between April and mid-September more than 62,000 migrants had crossed the border at El Paso alone.

El Paso has relocated more than 10,000 migrants by bus to New York City since August, with Lesser revealing at a public meeting last month that he got a green light to do so from Mayor Eric Adams.

The front cover of the New York Post for Oct. 18, 2022.

Adams has denied that assertion and publicly called on Leeser to end the program earlier this month, saying “New York cannot accommodate the number of buses that we have coming here to our city.”

The Oct. 7 appeal came the same day Hizzoner declared a state of emergency in the Big Apple over its migrant crisis.

But the buses have continued rolling to the city from El Paso, most recently on Sunday.

Leeser has said that most of the migrants flooding El Paso come from Venezuela.

In recent days, migrants have been able to simply walk across the dried-up Rio Grande, surrender to US Customs and Border Protection officials and get released after saying they intend to seek political asylum.

Last week, the US and Mexican governments announced a deal under which Venezuelans who cross into the US would be sent back to Mexico.

But border sources told The Post that the agreement was only being enforced in a small number of cases.

The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Suspected Terrorists Who Crossed Border Into United States May Have Been Released: Mayorkas

Some of the 42 illegal immigrants who were arrested by U.S. border agents and identified as suspected terrorists may have been released into the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandryo Mayorkas said on May 4.

“Some may be placed in removal proceedings. Some may be placed in criminal custody. Some may be cooperating with law enforcement. Some may be downgraded from the terrorist rating,” Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland & Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington.

Mayorkas said officials in his agency know the “precise disposition” of each of the 42 suspected terrorists but declined to share that information in a public setting.

Instead, he offered to give a classified briefing to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who had been questioning him.

“I look forward to getting that information,” Portman said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently revealed that 42 people on the terror watchlist “attempted to enter the United States illegally” and were arrested by border agents between Jan. 20, 2021 and March 2022. The watchlist is maintained by the FBI, which says people on it are “reasonably suspected to be involved in terrorism (or related activities).”

In a hearing in late April, Mayorkas said he did not know whether any of the terrorists had been released into the United States, triggering criticism from Republicans.

In his opening statement, Portman, the ranking member of the Senate panel, described himself as shocked when he learned about the number of suspected terrorists apprehended.

Other Republicans during the hearing on Wednesday also touched on the issue.

The 42 “are the ones we know you caught; we don’t know how many you didn’t,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told Mayorkas.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman, took a different angle regarding the watchlist.

Peters said Arab-Americans, including those in the state he represents, have “long endured lengthy and intrusive screening when traveling” and noted that Biden while campaigning in 2020 promised to order DHS to review how people are placed on the watchlist and the no-fly list to make sure that the processes “do not have an adverse impact on individuals or groups based on national origin, race, religion or ethnicity” and to “improve the process to remove names, when justified, from these lists.”

“Can you provide an update on the progress of your review and when you expect changes to be implemented?” Peters asked.

Mayorkas said the work is underway but that he could not provide any further information at this time.

BREAKING: Biden Announces End of Important Immigration Law

President Joe Biden, in a widely expected but nevertheless highly disappointing to many anti-illegal immigration activists move, decided to end Title 42, an immigration law implemented by the Trump Administration that gave immigration authorities the ability to more easily and quickly get rid of illegal immigrants. Just the News, reporting on that move, notes that:

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday the end of enforcement of Title 42, a decades-old federal law impose by the Trump administration to limit immigration to stop the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

The announcement was widely expected and will be effective May 23, a date that was also expected.

The CDC, the agency technically responsible for the law because it related to public health and the pandemic, announced the end of Title 42 by saying in a statement that:

“In consultation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), this termination will be implemented on May 23, 2022, to enable DHS time to implement appropriate COVID-19 mitigation protocols, such as scaling up a program to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to migrants and prepare for resumption of regular migration under Title 8.

“After considering current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19 (such as highly effective vaccines and therapeutics), the CDC Director has determined that an Order suspending the right to introduce migrants into the United States is no longer necessary.“

Team Biden, for its part, argued that ending the measure would not mean that illegal immigrants would be able to stay in the US, arguing in a press conference conducted by Kate Beddingfield that:

“To be clear, most individuals who crossed the border without legal authorization will be promptly placed into removal proceedings and if they are unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States, they’ll be expeditiously removed.

“As a reminder, economic need and flight from generalized violence is not a basis for asylum, but rather asylum is for those with a well-founded fear of persecution on a protected ground.”

Biden’s lackey can claim whatever she wants, but illegal immigrants themselves don’t seem to believe her. They, supposedly in desperate need of help but still somehow able to stay up to date on changes to US policy, have been massing around the border in expectation of Title 42 being done away with. As I reported a few days ago:

[A]ccording to Axios, there are not only perhaps 170,000 migrants waiting to head to the border once Title 42 ends, but there are also perhaps 25,000 migrants waiting along the US-Mexico border to cross once it’ll be harder to deport them.

So, while Team Biden claims that getting rid of a major tool for removing illegals won’t prove deleterious to the anti-illegal immigration mission, a tool Yahoo reports has been used about 1.7 million times in the Biden presidency, the illegal immigrants who are risking the border crossing seem to think otherwise. That means, at the very least, that the Border Patrol officer bravely manning the border despite Biden’s bumbling could soon have an even larger problem to deal with.

This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics

WARNING: 170,000 Illegals Amass on US Southern Border Ready to STORM ACROSS When Biden Ends Trump’s COVID Rules — DHS Puts Out Call for Volunteers (VIDEO)

WARNING: 170,000 Illegals Amass on US Southern Border Ready to STORM ACROSS When Biden Ends Trump’s COVID Rules — DHS Puts Out Call for Volunteers (VIDEO)
— Read on www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/warning-170000-illegals-amass-us-southern-border-ready-storm-across-biden-ends-trumps-covid-rules-video/

Omnibus Legislation Funds Border Security for 8 Foreign Nations

Democrats’ $1.5 trillion omnibus legislation would provide funding for border security in eight foreign nations—many of whom are U.S. adversaries—while providing no new money for security along the U.S. border.

The omnibus measure allocates $370 million to “enhanced border security” measures in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman, of which $150 million alone is set to go toward border funding in Jordan. In addition, the legislation provides funding for border security measures in Libya, Nepal, and Pakistan, a longtime U.S. adversary.

As a compromise, Republican lawmakers retained about $2 billion in previously allocated border wall construction funds, but the omnibus measure contains no new funds for border security along the U.S. southern border.

Preston Huennekens, government relations manager at the nonpartisan Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), blasted the measure in a statement to The Epoch Times.

“It is insulting to the American people that Democrats would rather secure the borders of countries such as Oman, Pakistan, and Libya while our own states on the border are overwhelmed with illegal immigration,” Huennekens said. “The omnibus package offered exactly zero dollars for the hiring of any additional border or immigration agents and also took steps to dismantle enforcement tools such as the 287(g) program.”

The program referenced by Huennekens allows state and local law enforcement officials to aid the Department of Homeland Security to find and deport illegal aliens.

“This shows that Democrats are simply out of touch with the American electorate, who overwhelmingly disapprove of President [Joe] Biden’s handling of immigration,” he said. “Democrats ignore our raging border crisis at their own peril.”

Since Biden took office, he has taken a far more laissez-faire approach to border security than former President Donald Trump.

Biden halted construction on Trump’s border wall almost immediately after taking office, leaving construction materials that had already been paid for by the federal government sitting unused along the border. At the same time, he reduced the number of border security agents, leaving those agents who remain unable to stop the unprecedented inflow of illegal immigrants into the country.

He also overturned Trump’s “Stay in Mexico” policy, which required that those seeking asylum in the United States remain in Mexico until their asylum applications were approved.

The United States already is facing unprecedented levels of illegal immigration along its southern border, which critics have blamed on the Biden administration’s laissez-faire attitude toward enforcement of immigration law. Viral images and videos have circulated on the internet showing massive numbers of immigrants crossing into the country, often without a border patrol agent in sight.

Alarming reports have arisen from Americans living in border towns, which are facing the constant threat of criminal sex and drug traffickers crossing the border. Several interviewees living along the U.S.–Mexico border say that they’re now unable to leave their homes without a firearm, and they don’t let their children out of their sight while outside.

Border patrol agents say that they’re swamped, and they’ve been unable to apprehend a large portion of illegal entrants to the country, leaving many border residents to fend for themselves.

Estimates of how many illegal aliens have entered the country since Biden took office vary, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show that about 2 million people illegally crossed the border in 2021, a nearly fourfold increase from illegal crossings a year earlier.

Worsening the situation, many illegal aliens who are apprehended by border security agents have since been released into the United States.

According to an October 2021 letter by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), in the January–August period in 2021, roughly 500,000 illegal aliens were released into the United States after being detained by border security.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and several other Republicans have placed the blame for the massive increase in illegal immigration on the policies of the Biden administration.

“The cause of all of this is simple,” Cruz said in an October 2021 press conference. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to enforce the law.”

During that conference, Cruz and several Senate Republican colleagues called on Biden to return to the immigration policies of Trump by restarting construction on the border wall, ending the policy of “catch and release,” and reinstituting the “Remain in Mexico” policy.