Washington, D.C. (January 5, 2023) - The Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, Todd Bensman, traveled to Mexico to investigate rumors about a shelter in Tijuana serving only Muslim migrants and about thousands of illegal immigrants being funneled into the United States through ports of entry under a questionable program that makes border crossing legal. His trip took him to Tijuana and Mexicali.
Given the large number of “special interest aliens” (SIAs), U.S.-bound immigrants from countries where Islamic terrorist groups operate, on the FBI terrorism watch list, Bensman wondered about the national security implications of Mexico’s first Muslim immigrant shelter, which shelters mostly SIAs. He visited the shelter and conducted the first interview of its director, who has never been contacted by American officials, about the sensitive national security issues the operation raises for the United States.
While in Tijuana Bensman discovered that with the help of non-profit advocacy groups, the Biden administration has been operating a secretive new “humanitarian parole” program that legalizes intending border crossers in Mexico and then allows Mexican authorities to discretely hand them off to American authorities at the border for resettlement. The administration’s parallel immigration system is a work-around to evade court-ordered expulsion policies and appears to be funneling immigrants into the United States through ports of entry out of the sight of news drone cameras, invisible to the American public, and absent from the border apprehension statistics.
In Mexicali, Bensman found the same soaring demand for the expanding system of Mexican shelters that gradually feed their occupants through American ports of entry with temporary legal status and opportunity to make the big move permanent.
In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of
Parsing Immigration Policy, contrasts the United Arab Emirates’ “emiratization” program, which incentivizes employers to transition jobs from foreign workers to citizens, with U.S. policy, which actually subsidizes the employment for certain foreign workers. Krikorian says that foreign worker programs should have as their goal the elimination of the programs by replacing the workers with Americans.
