More than 283,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico this past year were let into the United States, despite the Biden administration’s claims that it was immediately turning away adults and families, the Washington Examiner has learned.
The extremely high number of releases at the southern border, based on unreleased Border Patrol data shared with the Washington Examiner by Rep. Henry Cuellar, means that one-in-six of the 1.66 million people who walked across between land ports of entry were let go directly by the Border Patrol between Oct. 1, 2020, and Sept. 30.
The releases in question are separate from instances in which hundreds of thousands of other migrants were also released into the U.S. by other government entities, including the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement and Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The Mexican president and the Guatemalan president are saying that the [Biden] administration has given the impression of open borders,” said Cuellar, a Democrat whose district sits on the Texas-Mexico border. “You can imagine what’s the word on the street over there, and that’s why we keep getting people coming in.”
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Border Patrol agents are so overwhelmed with the volume of illegal immigrants showing up this year that they started releasing migrants out of the back doors of their stations without providing them legal documents that mandate they appear before an immigration judge about their unlawful entry or asylum claim.
Of the 283,000 releases, about 95,000 noncitizens were released with “Notices to Report” telling them to check in at the local ICE office once in the city they wish to live. It means that the government is effectively relying on them to hold themselves accountable for illegally entering the country. But there is no record of them in the court system to ensure that they do.
Border Patrol agents are responsible for apprehending and initially detaining those who illegally cross the border rather than attempt to cross through ports of entry, where noncitizens and U.S. citizens entering the country are supposed to supply proof of documentation and be inspected before admission. For decades, the Border Patrol intercepted mostly Mexicans who were illegally walking across to the U.S. to work. But over the past decade, migration trends have shifted, and border-crossers are mostly families and children due to poor conditions in their countries of origin and changes in U.S. immigration policies.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, families and adults encountered at the border would be arrested by the Border Patrol and then taken to a station and processed. Families would be turned over from the Border Patrol to ICE, which could hold them at family residential centers up to 20 days before it would have to release them. The massive backlog in the immigration courts made seeing a judge in that 20-day span impossible, prompting ICE to release most families directly into the U.S. However, those families were given notices of when to appear in court and tracked by the government.
The biggest change now is that families and adults are being directly released by the Border Patrol rather than being sent to ICE. ICE is also doing its own releases and holding people in hotels for short periods rather than putting people in existing facilities. In addition, more than 120,000 children have been released into the U.S. by HHS in fiscal year 2021.
A change in Mexican state laws a year ago blocked non-Mexican families with children who are 7 years of age and older from being returned to Mexico on the basis that shelters cannot accommodate the returns. In response, Border Patrol was unable to immediately expel all families and adults at the border, as it had been doing since March 2020.
Still, the Biden administration has continued to claim that it is still following the coronavirus-related health guidance and sending back migrant families who make it across the border.
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In 2019, a monthslong surge of families from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border put the Border Patrol in a similarly tight situation. Families were again released but tracked by the government.
