Why Sneak in When the Front Door Is Wide Open?
FAIR Take | July 2023
If there’s one lesson from the May 2023 Customs and Border Protection encounter numbers, it’s that the devil is in the details. Over 273,000 illegal aliens were encountered while attempting to enter the U.S. in May, another huge sum that should come as no surprise given the Biden administration’s consistent failure to address the crisis of illegal immigration.
What the raw total won’t tell you, though, is that a growing number of those illegal aliens are only stopped momentarily before being fast-tracked directly into the U.S. by the government itself. The Biden administration’s policies are designed to let in as many illegal aliens as possible. Unfortunately, as a deeper dive into these numbers shows, this strategy seems to be working quite well.
When illegal aliens arrive at our land, air, or sea borders, they’re met by agents who work for one of two –agencies (called “components”) of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). If they try to cross between ports of entry, like swimming across the Rio Grande, they are arrested by Border Patrol. If they present themselves without a visa or other required documents at a port of entry, like an airport or official border crossing, they become the responsibility of the Office of Field Operations (OFO). Normally, OFO would determine an illegal alien is “inadmissible” and refuse them entry or transfer them to ICE custody for deportation.
Increasingly, thanks to the Biden administration, that is no longer the case. In May, over 100,000 of the 273,000 illegal aliens entering the U.S. (38 percent) were stopped by OFO, a record monthly number overall for the agency. For comparison, 275,000 illegal aliens were stopped in May 2022 and only just under 50,000 (18 percent) fell under OFO. That steady increase in OFO percentage reflects the Biden administration’s efforts to make illegal immigration as easy and rewarding as possible.
There are two main reasons OFO has seen a dramatic rise in the number of encounters at ports of entry. First, Biden’s new asylum policy, introduced in February and finalized in May, provides that asylum-seekers are not eligible to claim asylum unless they present themselves (through an appointment made through the CBPOne App or using one of the very generous loopholes in that process) at a port of entry. This drives illegal aliens away from Border Patrol jurisdiction between ports of entry, allowing the administration to tout “falling” numbers that have simply been redirected.
The second reason OFO has seen a dramatic rise in encounters with illegal aliens is that President Biden has made abusing the parole authority the centerpiece of his open-borders policy. The main way this drives traffic to the ports of entry is through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole program, which flies up to 30,000 illegal aliens a month from those countries directly into interior ports of entry in American cities, building on other dubious parole programs for Afghans and Ukrainians. Participants in these programs are counted as OFO “inadmissible” encounters, not Border Patrol, because they are stopped at ports of entry and have no legal authorization to enter the U.S. However, the legal fiction of immigration parole lets these illegal aliens enter and live in the U.S. without any real vetting or oversight despite not technically being “admitted”. The increasing percentage and number of encounters involving OFO, both hitting record highs in May 2023, reflect just how “successful” these programs are at moving illegal aliens into the U.S.
Why, as an illegal alien, would you bother with the risk of crossing the Rio Grande and Arizona desert or brave the freezing plains of our Northern border? After all, the Biden administration has made entering the U.S. as easy as scheduling a doctor’s appointment. In fact, immigration parolees are eligible for health care and a huge number of other costly taxpayer-funded benefits that other illegal aliens cannot access easily. Parolees are also eligible to obtain work authorization despite having no legal status, meaning that the government is directly placing them into competition with American workers and driving down wages. Every time these extralegal parole programs are expanded, it only drives up the percentage of our surging illegal alien population that can access benefits and compete directly with citizen workers.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration can claim that Border Patrol arrests are down because those arrests have been moved to other categories by the asylum and parole shell games. Department of Homeland Security press releases are quick to point out that entries between ports of entry have significantly decreased, but they neglect to mention the tens of thousands of illegal aliens who have been redirected to ports of entry. These illegal aliens are then released into the U.S. with eligibility for work authorization and no shortage of government benefits available to them, costing American taxpayers incredible sums of money.
For the Biden administration, this is working exactly as intended. President Biden has promised to veto any bill that might upset his administration’s ability to continue admitting hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every month. Americans deserve to know the real meaning behind these monthly border numbers because the nuances in how illegal aliens come here have real costs for everyone else down the line. Border security is not closing the windows while leaving the front door wide open, and the Biden administration can’t be allowed to claim credit for “managing the border” by making it meaningless.