Townhall, March 27, 2023
AUSTIN, Texas – As senior Biden administration officials run victory laps over seemingly sharply declining Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal alien Southwest Border crossings, no one has bothered to wheel out the one stumbling block that would face-plant those politicians: statistical data the administration has hidden away somewhere.
The illegal land border crossings for both January and February were in the 128,000 range, compared to the 200,000-220, 000 range throughout much of 2022 sounded really great to anyone who didn’t understand a politically accounting scheme that is underway.
Left out of the illegal crossings data is another dataset that would reveal how much of that apparent decline is counted elsewhere as part of a legally challenged admittance scheme the Biden DHS vastly expanded in mid-January to issue “humanitarian exceptions” for legalized escorted crossings of foreign nationals who were going to jump the border.
This scheme’s objective, as I have previously revealed, is to entice those intending border crossers, while they are still south of it, to petition Biden’s DHS for “humanitarian parole” on a telephone/computer app called CBP-One before they cross. Those approved then get flown into America from unknown foreign airports or escorted overland, with permission, at unrevealed land ports of entry, sight unseen, given work authorization – and counted somewhere that is not fully public. Texas and 19 other states have sued over the administration’s mass use of humanitarian parole.
In the absence of any full accounting of those entries or court resolution to their legality, the administration has enjoyed a Houdini-esque illusion of sharply declining entries of foreign nationals into America when the total number of entries may prove as high or even higher than all prior entrance peaks.
But what few if anyone seemed to realize while The Washington Post and other major media organizations uncritically enabled the Biden government victory laps is that the number of those rechanneled out of the illegal entry statistics, had the Biden administration not stashed them out of public sight, would provide the full picture of how many foreign nationals in total are still crossing the southern border, one way or another.
That is a number the American people absolutely deserve, in granularity, so that citizens living in a Democracy can see and weigh the true consequences of government policies, especially when the government behind such policies seems determined to hide them.
Remarkably, no one appeared to be asking for the statistics, until March 24, when eight House Republicans marshaled by Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany sent a demand letter to DHS Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas.
The Demand Letter
Eight House Republicans spearheaded by Rep. Tiffany have penned a letter to DHS Secretary Mayorkas demanding all the data that would tell the public just how many humanitarian exceptions the administration is granting, to whom, and where and how their recipients are entering.
“As we wait for the courts to continue to strike down your irresponsible interpretation of immigration laws, our country continues to endure the financial hardship caused by allowing millions of people in – a hardship that will be endured by every taxpayer in the United States,” the letter states. “As you focus your energy on finding novel ways to undermine the laws of this country – instead of enforcing them – we continue to see unprecedented illegal immigration into our country.”
The other Member signatories include Andy Biggs, Jeff Duncan, Tom McClintock, Laurel Lee and Troy Nehls. They want the data by April 4 “to further our oversight mission, as we determine budgetary requirements, and other matters.”
Until the administration complies, analysts like the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew R. Arthur have had no choice but to extrapolate what they could from some humanitarian parole CBP-One grant data that is public for a few nationalities, such as Venezuelans (12,300 in February), Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cubans (23,100). These show, at the least, that the numbers being counted elsewhere other than as illegal crossings are in the tens of thousands per month.
But the evidence is overwhelming that the administration is granting humanitarian parole through CBP-One to a great many other nationalities that neither the administration nor national media or think tanks ever acknowledge, I have found in my own reporting south of the border. These other nationalities include regular Mexicans, Hondurans and Guatemalans as well as a wide diversity of other surprising nationalities such as Afghans, Somalis, Russian Chechens, Tajikisanis, and Uzbeks, to name a few. The activist journalist Ben Bergquam of Real America’s Voice recently found Mexicans waiting on their CBP-One applications in a Reynosa, Mexico camp full of applicants.
The Republicans are demanding information that will fill out not just the totality of the Biden humanitarian parole giveaway program to all nationalities but also exactly where and how they are entering America by air and land. They also demand to know the extent to which the Biden administration denies and approves these applicants.
Here’s the letter and its list of demands.
Godspeed.