The National Review Online, January 31, 2022
Two recent immigration videos are causing the Biden administration headaches — and the administration has no one to blame but itself.
The first was newly released body-cam footage (via an open-records-act request) from August showing illegal aliens being flown to the airport near White Plains, north of New York City, in the middle of the night. These were, and continue to be, planeloads of “unaccompanied” “minors” whom their illegal-alien relatives in the U.S. paid to have smuggled to the U.S. border. They then turn themselves in to immigration authorities and, under a dishonest interpretation of a 2008 law, are delivered at taxpayer expense from the border to their illegal-alien relatives, the government essentially becoming an accomplice to the smuggling conspiracy.
These midnight flights to White Plains were reported by local media when they began in August, and were then picked up by the New York Post in October. Jen Psaki laughed off the Post story, and that seemed to be the end of it.
Until last week, when the body-cam footage from a cop at the airport was released. The video showed conversations between the officer and the private contractors managing the flights and the bus transfers for DHS and HHS. Because the contractors weren’t policymakers or spin doctors, just guys doing a job, they spoke freely to the officer responsible for airport security trying to figure out what was going on.
And, hoo-boy, it was not good for the Biden administration.
One of the contractors summed up the whole thing: “DHS wants everything on the down-low. . . . Everything’s supposed to be hush-hush.”
When asked by the officer why the flights were coming to his small airport after hours, there’s this:
“You don’t want to be in somewhere the spotlight is,” the contractor replied. “You want to try and be as down low as possible. A lot of this is just down-low stuff that we don’t tell people because what we don’t want to do is attract attention. We don’t want the media. Like we don’t even know where we’re going when they tell us.”
Sounds totally above-board.
A later exchange between the officer, Sergeant Michael Hamborsky, and a contractor, is no better:
One of the contractors told the officer later in the video: “I get the whole secrecy and all that s–t but this is even above my f–king pay grade . . . the f- -k, you know what I mean?”
“And why? You know why?” Hamborsky asked.
“You know why, look who’s in office. That’s why, come on,” the contractor said.
“But what’s the big secret?” the cop asked.
“You know why. Because if this gets out, the government is betraying the American people,” the contractor said.
The White House responded last week that there was nothing secret about it, it’s all legit, nothing to see here. The administration can pretend it’s all legal and routine, but it’s not true. In fact, the 2008 law the administration is relying on to facilitate this mass illegal immigration of minors (and those claiming to be minors) simply does not apply to the bulk of the illegal-alien teens being transported at taxpayer expense from the border to locations around the country.
The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) is supposed to apply to unaccompanied minors who have been trafficked across the border — which does not describe the vast majority of those on the flights to White Plains and elsewhere. As my colleague Jon Feere has written, “Federal law defines an ‘unaccompanied alien child’ as an illegal alien under the age of 18 who is without ‘a parent or legal guardian in the United States’.” But almost all these teenagers are here precisely because they have parents or other relatives in the U.S. — relatives who paid to have them brought here. So they’re simply not unaccompanied.
What’s more, “trafficking” and “smuggling” are different things, though intentionally conflated by anti-borders activists. The first involves coercion or deception of some kind — often for forced labor, prostitution, etc. TVPRA, as its name suggests, targets this loathsome crime.
But very few of the illegal-alien teenagers in question have been trafficked. Instead, they’ve been smuggled, meaning they’re part of a voluntary criminal conspiracy between smugglers and the relatives in the U.S. paying them.
It’s precisely because of the misuse of the TVPRA to effect family reunification for illegal aliens — something that has gotten increasing attention around the country — that the Biden administration wanted to keep the flights hush-hush and on the down-low. Too late.
The other video causing the White House immigration headaches came from the border itself. This showed the mass release of single adult male illegal aliens in the South Texas city of Brownsville. These are not families, let alone “unaccompanied” minors, but single adults — some with criminal records in the U.S.
They were likely Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and others whom Mexico refuses to accept under Title 42 pandemic expulsions — Mexico has no doubt been emboldened in this by President Biden’s manifest decrepitude and impotence (like every other country with an issue with the U.S.). DHS could instead enroll them in the re-started Remain in Mexico program, which Mexico would allow but which the Biden administration is intentionally slow-walking. Or, it could detain them, as required by law (if they’re not sent back to Mexico), but the administration is opposed to immigrant detention in principle and doesn’t have enough capacity in any case.
So, the result is the mass releases shown in the video, releases explained away with the same “nothing to see here” doubletalk as we heard regarding the White Plains flights. The likelihood that any of them will ever be made to leave, regardless of the outcome of any asylum claims or other proceedings, is vanishingly small.
Both of these videos provide a peek at the administration’s facilitation of mass illegal immigration. And I say “facilitation” rather than “promotion” because I differ from others in that I don’t think there’s a plan here – this crowd doesn’t appear able to plan their way out of a paper sack. Instead, what we’re seeing play out is the modern Left’s rejection of the idea of borders, its belief that the American people, through their constitutional processes, do not have the right to keep out any foreigner who wants to move here.
That doesn’t mean everyone is getting in on their first try — yet; millions more people would move here if the full Cato Institute/Center for American Progress immigration agenda were implemented. Some people in the White House still retain a tenuous connection to political reality, after all, which is why so much of what’s going on in immigration is kept opaque and on the down-low.
But it does mean the Biden administration can’t bring itself to take the steps needed to enforce the borders of the United States.
No wonder Border Patrol agents are literally turning their backs on DHS secretary Mayorkas.