By Earlier in the year, Speaker Mike Johnson made a startling claim. He said illegal immigrants allowed into the United States by President Biden’s lax border policies have begun showing up at government offices to sign up for benefits and services.
They are also encouraged to sign up to vote for Democrats.
Why wouldn’t they? Fifty percent of jobs created under Biden have reportedly gone to undocumented immigrants and the president has been clear that he wants them to have free healthcare.
Despite looking like he’s trying to get tougher on the border, Fox News writes that Biden has effectively been granting amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants over the past few years.
A report released last month by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data gathering organization that tracks immigration cases and backlogs shows that since 2022, over 350,000 asylum cases filed by migrants were closed by the U.S. government on the basis that those who filed did not have a criminal record or were not deemed a threat to the U.S.
Once cases are terminated without a decision on the merits of their asylum claim, the migrants are removed from the legal system, and they are not required to check in with authorities.
It also means the migrants can legally go anywhere they want inside the U.S. without having to worry about being deported.
TRAC’s data shows that in the same year, there were 173,227 applications for asylum filed. Of those applications, immigration judges ordered 36,250 of the applicants be removed from the U.S., granted asylum to 31,859 applicants. The other 102,550 applications were reportedly dismissed or taken off the books.
In 2023, there were 248,232 asylum applications filed, of which 52,440 applicants were ordered to be removed, 43,113 were granted asylum, and 149,305 were dismissed or taken off the books.
Bernardo Castro Mata was likely one of the 350,000 who saw their cases dismissed over the past year. The Venezuelan migrant has been accused of shooting two NYPD cops during the early hours of Monday. He crossed the southern border illegally last year, but the case against him has already been dismissed, The New York Post revealed.
“This is just a massive amnesty under the guise of prosecutorial discretion,” according to Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who works for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“You’re basically allowing people who don’t have a right to be in the United States to be here indefinitely,” he added to The Post.
“Please let everyone know what’s really going on,” an ICE officer told The New York Post.
As he continues to struggle to fend off Donald Trump in the polls and Americans say inflation and immigration are their most important issues month after month, President Biden recently announced that he would portray himself as trying to implement border security. After spending much of the year claiming that he could not act on the border without a congressional bill that would have legalized even more migrants, Biden has changed course, announcing an executive order to “seal the border.”
“Mr. Biden’s senior aides have briefed members of Congress in recent days on the forthcoming action and told them to expect the president to sign the order alongside mayors from South Texas, according to several people familiar with the plans.
‘I’ve been briefed on the pending executive order,’ said Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas who previously criticized Mr. Biden for not bolstering enforcement at the border earlier in his presidency. “I certainly support it because I’ve been advocating for these measures for years. While the order is yet to be released, I am supportive of the details provided to me thus far.”
The order would represent the single most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any modern Democrat, and echoes a 2018 effort by President Donald J. Trump to block migration that was assailed by Democrats and blocked by federal courts,” according to The New York Times.
The order will still allow thousands to enter the United States every day, however. The Associated Press noted that the border would only be closed if “daily encounters hits 2,500 between ports of entry, with the border reopening once that number declines to 1,500, according to several people familiar with the discussions….The figures are daily averages over the course of a week.”
Last October, the migrant backlog for processing claims hit 8 million, a roughly 167% increase in five years, according to internal government projections obtained by Axios.
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