Washington, D.C. (March 4, 2024) – Recent statements from ongoing litigation by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have revealed that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.

CBP refuses to disclose the names of the U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens (a dozen unnamed facilities are receiving most of the aliens) or the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency justifies this secrecy under a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”

Now, the Center’s litigation has yielded an answer from the government: The public can’t know the receiving airports because those hundreds of thousands of CBP-authorized arrivals have created such “operational vulnerabilities” at airports that “bad actors” could undermine law enforcement efforts to “secure the United States border” if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry.

Todd Bensman, the Center’s national security fellow states, “The Biden administration’s legally dubious program to fly inadmissible aliens over the border and directly to U.S. airports has allegedly created law enforcement vulnerabilities too grave to release publicly, lest “bad actors” take advantage of them to inflict harm on public safety. This raises significant questions about the Biden administration’s parole programs and their impact on national security.”

“The Center will continue to advocate for the full disclosure of airport information, insisting on the need for accountability in immigration policies,” said the Center’s Chief FOIA Counsel, Colin Farnsworth.
Several large immigrant-receiving cities and much of the media have blamed the migrant influx in cities away from the border on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program. The airport location information would provide a more accurate picture of what is happening, and the Texas governor would not be able to be blamed for these arrivals.