Washington D.C. (March 20, 2023) - CBP’s latest migrant encounter
numbers for February reveal that while Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border have declined from FY 2022’s record-setting pace, they’re still running at historic highs, as tens of thousands of illegal entrants continue to stream into the United States.
Digging into those statistics reveals that the Biden administration is attempting to hide its deepening border disaster by funneling tens thousands of other aliens from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba through the land-border ports and the interior airports through a illegal “parole” scheme.
In CBP’s
February 2023 “Monthly Operational Update”, the agency lauds the Biden administration’s
January 5 “new border enforcement measures”. Among those measures is a new procedure by which would-be illegal migrants—with no permission or right to be admitted-- can schedule appointments for interviews with CBP officers at the Southwest border ports through the
CBP One mobile app to enter the United States.
While CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller contends he is “encouraged by the new functionality in the CBP One mobile application, which has provided migrants the ability to safely and easily schedule an appointment at a Port of Entry to request a humanitarian exception to the Title 42 public health order”, that update buries an ongoing three-month delay in port interview appointments, time those aliens must wait on the other side of the border in Mexican shelters.
A three-month stay in Mexican shelters isn’t unreasonable given that those migrants assumed the risk in entering Mexico illegally of remaining in that country indefinitely. However, it significantly undermines migrant safety concerns cited by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to justify ending the Trump administration’s successful “Migrant Protection Protocols” (
MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico”.
Under MPP, illegal migrants apprehended at the Southwest border were sent back to Mexico to await their asylum hearings. To guarantee their safety during that wait, the Trump administration forced the Mexican government to agree to provide returned migrants with “all appropriate humanitarian protections for the duration of their stay”.
Nonetheless, in
October 2021 Secretary Mayorkas argued that he had to end Remain in Mexico because, “Significant evidence indicates that individuals awaiting their court hearings in Mexico under MPP were subject to extreme violence and insecurity at the hands of transnational criminal organizations that profited by exploiting migrants’ vulnerabilities.” His termination of Remain in Mexico is the subject of a lawsuit filed by state plaintiffs to force DHS to resume MPP in
Texas v. Biden.
Either Mayorkas misrepresented the dangers migrants face in Mexico then or the Biden administration no longer cares about migrants’ safety on the other side of the border now. Either way, Congress and the courts may want to get to the bottom of this crucial issue.
