The Biden administration has allowed more than 283,000 illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. this past year, and nearly 100,000 of those immigrants are not being tracked by immigration officials, according to the Washington Examiner.
Unreleased Border Patrol data shared by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, showed that one-in-six of the 1.66 million people who crossed the border illegally between Oct. 1 2020 and Sept. 1 2021 were released into the U.S. despite Biden officials’ insistence that migrants seeking access to the U.S. would be turned away.
Of those releases, 95,000 of them were assigned “Notices to Report” telling them to check in at the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office once they arrive in the city in which they want to live.
However, there is no way to guarantee that these migrants will check in with ICE. More often than not, they never do.
“The Mexican president and the Guatemalan president are saying that the [Biden] administration has given the impression of open borders,” Cuellar said.
“You can imagine what’s the word on the street over there, and that’s why we keep getting people coming in,” he said.
During the coronavirus pandemic, migrants arrested by Border Patrol would be turned over to ICE for detainment and processing. But now, because of the massive influx of migrants crossing the southern border, immigration officials have had to release migrants into the country before they’re able to be fully processed.
Former President Donald Trump did away with this practice during his administration, but the Biden administration reintroduced it earlier this year. President Joe Biden also did away with a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration authorities to send migrants back to Mexico to await asylum proceedings.
A federal court ordered the Biden administration to re-implement the “Remain in Mexico” policy, but Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has ignored the order.
