On August 14, the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office in Buffalo, N.Y., reported its officers had arrested Gianfranco Torres-Navarro, a 38-year-old Peruvian national first encountered in May by CBP at the Southwest border after entering illegally, and then quickly processed and released. ERO Buffalo left out the part where he’s also apparently the leader of a gang called “Los Killers” back home, and while ICE mentioned he’s “wanted in his home country”, they failed to explain he’s wanted in connection with 23 killings there. Just who, exactly, is vetting migrants before they’re released — and more importantly, why are they being released at all?
May 16, Near Roma, Texas. ERO Buffalo notes Torres-Navarro crossed the Rio Grande into the U.S. border town of Roma, Texas, on May 16, 2024. As per the office, he was then arrested by CBP and CBP “officials served him a notice to appear for immigration proceedings and he was released the same day”.
The “notice to appear” or “NTA” is the changing document in removal proceedings, akin to a complaint or indictment in a criminal case. Service of NTAs notifies aliens of their rights, the charges DHS has placed against them, and the time and place of their hearings.
Why was Torres-Navarro—or more importantly, how was he — released the same day he was stopped entering illegally? No idea, but I’ll lay out some possible scenarios.
While CBP doesn’t release daily encounter data, that month Border Patrol agents apprehended 137,475 illegal entrants at the Southwest border, a lot by historical standards, though a slow month in Biden-Harris terms.
In fact, CBP’s press release for its May monthly update lauds the administration’s efforts to drive apprehensions down:
In May 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded over 117,900 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border. In May, encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border were 9% lower than in April 2024. Single adult encounters in May decreased by 11% compared to April.
Torres-Navarro was ostensibly the definition of a “single adult” — seemingly alone, no apparent spouse or kids. Just a guy who crossed the roughly 200 feet of the Rio Grande separating Roma from Mexico, who may or may not have scaled the muddy hill from the river before he was encountered.
Still, maybe agents were too overwhelmed to properly deal with him.
Probably not, however. Roma, in Starr County, Texas, falls under the jurisdiction of the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Border Patrol sector, and more specifically is patrolled by agents from the Rio Grande City station.
Just who, exactly, is vetting migrants before they’re released — and more importantly, why are they being released at all?
In May, RGV agents apprehended fewer than 7,900 illegal migrants — again, a lot by normal standards, but nothing like the 38,000-plus aliens they nabbed the prior May or the 46,000 they dealt with the May before that.
Until recently, RGV was among the busiest of the Border Patrol’s nine Southwest sectors, likely due to its relative proximity to Central America. More than a fifth of the 2.2 million-plus illegal migrants apprehended in FY 2022, for example, were encountered there. In FY 2024, just 8.8 percent — just over one in 12 illegal migrants apprehended this fiscal year — have been stopped in the RGV.
Nor can a lack of detention space explain Torres-Navarro’s quick release.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, there were 36,571 aliens in ICE custody on May 19 — just less than 800 fewer than were detained two weeks later.
At the request of the Biden-Harris administration, Congress has authorized just 34,000 daily detention beds for ICE, but the DHS secretary has wide latitude to reprogram funds across programs — and can move money to pay for detention, as those figures show.
Perhaps Torres-Navarro made an asylum claim. That May 2024 CBP press release claims that: “CBP, in collaboration with [ICE] and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), continues to expeditiously process, remove, and strengthen consequences for individuals who cross our borders irregularly.”
Sounds tough, but it plainly wasn’t in this case. In any event, the USCIS reference is to the agency’s asylum officer corps, which performs credible-fear interviews for illegal entrants in expedited removal who make fear claims. Perhaps there was an asylum officer available who interviewed the Peruvian national and found he had a compelling claim.
It’s questionable whether that credible-fear interview occurred on the same day Torres-Navarro was apprehended (the Biden-Harris DHS gives illegal entrants time to consult with counsel before interviews occur, though the law doesn’t mandate it), but most Peruvian asylum claims (76 percent) are denied according to DOJ statistics, so it’s questionable whether he could have cleared that credible-fear bar.
Mandatory Detention. I raise all of these questions because every release of every illegal migrant at the border and the ports violates section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
As I have explained elsewhere, when agents encounter illegal entrants like Torres-Navarro, section 235 of the INA gives those agents a choice: They can process the aliens for expedited removal (which I alluded to above), a procedure that allows agents themselves to issue removal orders for aliens without valid asylum claims; or, they can serve those migrants with NTAs, place them into “regular” removal proceedings, and allow immigration judges to decide whether to issue removal orders.
What Congress forbids DHS from doing in such scenarios, however, is releasing those aliens, regardless of whether they are subject to expedited removal or regular removal.
Despite that fact, according to CBP stats, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border simply released more than 62,000 apprehended aliens in May on their own recognizance and with NTAs. Torres-Navarro wasn’t the only one released in violation of section 235 — he just happens to be the most notable of that bunch (thus far).
The main reason Congress has mandated migrant detention is to deter aliens from entering illegally and making weak, bogus, or fraudulent asylum claims simply to be released. A separate reason why those aliens are detained, however, is that it gives DHS time to dig into their backgrounds and ensure that, say, aliens wanted for 23 killings back home aren’t set free into communities here.
Biden-Harris Border Release Policies — Not Agents — Are to Blame. If the foregoing implies that I am blaming the Border Patrol agents who released Torres-Navarro near Roma, Texas, on May 16, I’m not; nothing could be further from the truth. The Biden-Harris administration has forced unwilling agents to release such aliens, as a federal judge determined in March 2023.
He further concluded that this categorical release policy is the main driver of the migrant crisis that agents at the Southwest border (and increasingly, mayors of big cities in the interior) have been experiencing since Biden and Harris took office.
While the administration hasn’t justified those widescale and illegal border releases, apparently whoever’s calling the shots has concluded most illegal migrants are otherwise law-abiding individuals deserving of lives in this country and in any event, immigration enforcement is de facto discrimination.
That’s a risky gamble, particularly given that the number of criminal aliens apprehended at the border has nearly quadrupled since FY 2019 and that 96 aliens on the terror watchlist have been nabbed there in FY 2024 alone (up from zero in FY 2019).
It’s not hyperbole to describe the border as the nation’s “skin”, a thin layer protecting the body politic from harmful and malignant actors. When illegal administration policies slice through that skin to usher any migrant — let alone wanted criminals and terrorists — into the country, it’s reckless malpractice.
How and why was an illegal migrant wanted for 23 killings in Peru released the same day he entered illegally? I don’t know, but if the administration were forced to answer that question, the American people would have a better sense of the dangers that are still out there. Better to know the truth and act than to live in a blissful complacency until it’s too late.