Guest post by Jonathon Davis of Conservative Brief– The worse the migrant crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border gets, the more it appears that it is being fed with bad policies implemented by the White House.
In addition to telling migrants to surge the U.S. border if he got elected, Joe Biden has since reversed most of Donald Trump’s border and immigration enforcement measures including the so-called ‘catch-and-release’ policy which critics say is the biggest driver of the surge.
But now there appears to be a new driver of illegal immigration, according to the New York Post.
US authorities have been releasing illegal immigrant families without notices to appear in immigration court amid an overwhelming record surge in border crossings.
News of the new practice came last week, when Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) revealed that about 150 migrants were released in one weekend “without a notice to appear” in court.
“How do you release somebody to the country without a notice to appear?” Cuellar said during a “Fox & Friends” interview.
Quickly releasing families is a way to more rapidly ease the burden on Customs and Border Protection agents who are dealing with significant overcrowding in their detention facilities already. In addition, the agency has been criticized on the left and right for holding migrant children longer than 72 hours, which is a violation of federal law.
But simply releasing migrants into the country isn’t solving anything; rather, it just makes more work for an equally overburdened Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, though Biden’s reversals of Trump policies have all but neutered ICE agents, to begin with.
In a statement to the NY Post, the CBP admitted that migrant families were being released without being given court notices.
“The process for providing someone with a Notice to Appear (NTA) frequently takes hours, which contributed to overcrowding in some Border Patrol facilities,” the agency said. “Due to these capacity issues, recently CBP began processing some individuals with a different form — known as an I-385 — that takes less time.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Times reported that the Biden administration is bussing migrant families all over the country and depositing them elsewhere:
Haitians and Cubans are fanning out to Florida, while Central Americans are surging into New York, California and the Washington, D.C., area.
One analyst called the mass movement of people “catch-and-bus,” a play on the Border Patrol’s newly revived policy of catch-and-release for tens of thousands of parents and children being nabbed at the border in recent weeks.
“Immediately overwhelmed and unwilling to return children with their parents, Biden’s DHS began handing out legal permission slips to pursue more permanent legal status later and put them on outward-bound buses,” Todd Bensman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in an account from the border in Del Rio, Texas.
Not all migrants are relegated to buses, however; those with more money go to airports and purchase plane tickets, the Times reported, citing Matthew Tragesser, press secretary for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He says he saw migrants in person at airports holding manila envelopes with labels that read: “Please help me. I do not speak English. What plane do I need to take?”
“They clearly know how to game the system,” Tragesser said. “After being taken into custody, they were quickly processed and moved into the interior of the country, all without COVID testing.
“This seems to be the Biden administration’s attempt to ‘manage’ the crisis by making it disappearaway from the border as quickly as possible,” he added.
