President Biden’s newly announced border policy will allow hundreds of thousands of migrants to apply for asylum in the US whether they deserve it or not — further undermining America’s immigration enforcement structure, a longtime border watcher said Friday.
In a White House speech Thursday, Biden announced the US would let 30,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans into the US each month — provided they apply for asylum via an official cellphone app, pay for their airfare and find a financial sponsor. Anyone who shows up at the frontier would be denied entry.
“Do not, do not just show up at the border,” Biden said. “Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”
However, the apparent tightening of migration restrictions is nothing more than a “shell game,” according to Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The biggest flaw of Biden’s border policies to this point has been his abject refusal to detain aliens entering illegally,” Arthur told The Post in an email Friday, calling such action “the only thing that would stop other migrants from entering illegally.”
Instead, according to US Customs and Border Protection’s own data, the vast majority of those apprehended have been allowed to wait for the outcome of their asylum cases in America.
In November, the most recent month for which statistics are available, 141,140 illegal border-crossers were detained and not summarily expelled under the Trump-era Title 42 health authority. Of that total, Arthur wrote on the Center’s website, fewer than 6,500 were subject to expedited removal, in which migrants without documents are sent back home.
“Expedited removal should have been the administration’s first recourse in response to the border,” Arthur told The Post. Instead, most migrants have been allowed to claim “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries and released into the US after the Biden administration stopped enforcing the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy.
The end result, according to Arthur, is that “nationals of all countries in the world will likely still be allowed to apply for asylum in the United States—regardless of the strength of their asylum claims.”
In fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30, more than 2.3 million migrants were apprehended attempting to cross the US-Mexico border, a number that doesn’t include those who eluded law enforcement and slipped into America undetected.
Biden made the announcement just days before a planned visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday for his first trip to the southern border as president. From there, he will travel on to Mexico City to meet with North American leaders on Monday and Tuesday.
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