WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) – A watchdog group is suing the Biden administration for hiding an amnesty policy that transports previously deported illegal aliens back to the United States.
Matt O’Brien
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is accusing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of concealing details about its policy to fly certain illegal aliens back into the country after being deported by prior administrations.
Foreigners who served in U.S. military services and were also deported for criminal offenses are included in the IRLC’s scope of concern.
The lawsuit, announced on Oct. 23, asks the federal court to rule that DHS must hand over all related documents and information pertaining to the policy.
Matt O’Brien, IRLI director of investigations, said in a statement: “IRLI would love to know why DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services think it’s appropriate to launch a special amnesty, by executive fiat, that gives foreign criminals special treatment merely because they served briefly in our military services.”
Record-Setting Tallies
This lawsuit follows a report given by U.S. border patrol officials announcing the latest border numbers. According to the officials, September 2023 saw nearly 270,000 encounters with illegal crossers, the highest monthly level ever. That number does not include so-called gotaways — those who sneak past overwhelmed border agents.
During the government’s last fiscal year, from Oct. 1, 2022 to Sept. 30, 2023, border officials determined that almost 2.5 million illegal immigrants crossed the U.S. southern border. Again, this number does not include the “gotaways,” which may number in the hundreds of thousands.
What’s more, none of these numbers include border crossers who are processed and given court dates — many of whom will fail to appear — further complicating an accurate accounting.
Townhall, a conservative media website, puts these numbers in perspective. It writes: “The president’s home state has fewer than one million residents. Take the population of Delaware, multiply it by 2.5, and that’s still fewer people than were encountered at the border in a single year.”
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but one source, USAFacts, reports that between October 2019 and June 2023, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office reported almost 7.7 million border encounters in the United States. This time frame roughly corresponds to the Biden administration.
The Vortex: Congress Going After Catholic Charities
A recent article in Breitbart puts the number of border crossers for the last fiscal year at 4 million, higher than the tally cited by Townhall. It contextualizes this number by comparing it to the 3.67 million Americans who were born during the same 12-month fiscal period, according to the Census Bureau.
Putting these numbers in perspective, it writes: “President Joe Biden’s deputies welcomed at least one economic migrant into the United States during the last 12 months for every American newborn.”
The article also placed the statistics in another context. It compares the 4 million immigrants flooding into the United States during the 2022–23 fiscal year to the 3 million young Americans graduating from high school in roughly the same period.
“One predictable result is that the new migrants are pricing ordinary Americans out of housing,” it concluded.
Biden’s Spin Not Resonating
The Biden administration has said that the border is “closed” and “secure.”
A recent Axios article even claimed that conservatives’ open border criticisms are based on a “myth.” “The reality is that the southern border is more fortified than it’s ever been,” it declared.
But the Hamas-Israeli conflict is causing new worries, with Americans sensing the danger of terrorists passing easily through porous borders. Federal officials warned this month that terrorists could be among the U.S. border crossers.
Ashley Moody
A coalition of 27 Republican state attorneys general wrote to the Biden administration, urging it to “fix the problem you created” because, as Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody noted in a statement, “there is no way to know who is in the U.S. or if they plan to enact terror on Americans.”
Bill Melugin, a journalist for Fox News, posted relevant numbers in this regard. He said Customs and Border Protection reported that its agents arrested 18 people on the FBI’s terror watchlist at the southern border in September, bringing the total for the 2023 fiscal year to 169, making it “the highest year ever recorded & higher than previous 6 years — combined.”
