Before 15,000 Haitian migrants made Springfield, Ohio, the center of the 2024 presidential race, a similar number of Haitian migrants put Del Rio, Texas, in the national spotlight in 2021.
“Although I foreshadowed a worst-case scenario,” Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano, a Democrat, told reporters, “this is probably a worse case of worst-case scenarios. I need the administration to recognize that there is a border crisis happening in real time right now, and it has dire consequences on security, health, and safety.”
At the time Bruno made that comment, approximately 10,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, were living outdoors under the International Bridge that connects Del Rio on the American side of the border with Ciudad Acuna on the Mexican side. They had no food, no water, and only a few porta-potties to share. It was a humanitarian disaster.
The Biden administration was shamed into action after mounted Border Patrol agents prevented 15,000 Haitians desperate for food from entering Del Rio. President Joe Biden even falsely accused the agents of whipping the migrants. He never apologized for that even after it was shown that he was lying about them.
By the time his administration cleared the bridge, Border Patrol agents had encountered around 30,000 migrants in Del Rio that month. About 10,000 of those migrants returned to Mexico voluntarily, another 15,000 were paroled into the United States, and 5,000 were flown back to Haiti.
“How could Biden do this to us?” Haitian migrant Sonia Piard asked reporters when she learned the plane she had boarded was destined for Port-au-Prince and not another American port of entry where she could be smoothly released into the U.S. “We did not know we were going back to Haiti. Nobody told us we were going back to Haiti.” Other Haitians attacked and even bit Border Patrol agents when they realized they were being flown back home and not let into the U.S.
What most Americans did not realize about the Haitians under Del Rio’s International Bridge is that most of them had not lived in Haiti for years. Most had been in countries such as Chile, Brazil, and even France.
But when Biden became president and essentially opened the border, the Haitian diaspora sensed a chance to come to the U.S. As a presidential candidate, Biden had told migrants around the world to ”surge” to the southern border, and many understandably took him at his word. For Haitians in particular, the promise of easy entry into America was strengthened in May 2021, when Biden granted Haitians already in the U.S. “Temporary Protected Status.” Deceitfully putting them on planes back to a country in which they had not lived for years, especially after inviting them to America, was a bait and switch by Biden, and their anger at the trick was entirely understandable.
Created by the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS empowers the president to grant temporary protections to nationals already in the U.S. from a country in which conditions make return unsafe. Congress used to make this designation on a case-by-case basis after natural disasters such as hurricanes.
But TPS is backward-looking and does not create a basis for legal entry. So, for example, even though Biden granted Haiti TPS status in May 2021, it protected only Haitians already in the U.S. It did not create a right of entry for any of the Haitians under the International Bridge.
But those Haitians not in the U.S. knew that if they could just get in, even if it meant illegally crossing the border, then eventually a Democratic president would grant them TPS too.
That is what happened. Since the May 2021 TPS designation for Haiti, Biden has granted TPS status to Haitian migrants in December 2023 and again in June. It means that all those migrants who illegally crossed the border and camped under the Del Rio bridge and were then released into the country are “temporarily” protected from deportation.
While Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democrats have no plans to stop the inflow of migrants from around the world, they want to limit bad preelection headlines created by humanitarian disasters such as the one at Del Rio.
This is where the CBP One app comes in.
When the Trump administration first created it, the CBP One app was designed to help truckers move cargo across the border faster. For example, if a trucker was shipping avocados from Tehuacan, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, he could use the CBP One app to schedule an appointment with Customs to inspect his truck and let him through the border without waiting in line.
The logic of the Biden administration was that if Trump could use the CBP One app to get avocados into the country faster, Democrats could use it to get illegal migrants into the country faster too. So, in January 2023, Biden began telling migrants without authorization to enter the U.S. that if they were living close to the southern border, they could use the CBP One app to make an appointment with a Border Patrol agent at a port of entry, where, after supplying basic information such as their names and birthdates, they would be released into the country on parole.
Parole has a statutory basis, but not the way Biden and the Democrats are abusing it. Chapter 8 Section 1182 of the U.S. Code details the legally required process for handling “Inadmissible aliens” — migrants who want to enter but have no right to do so.
By law, they are to be detained by the Department of Homeland Security until they can be deported to their home country or a safe third country. But the law does create an exception for emergencies. Specifically, it says an otherwise inadmissible alien may be released into the U.S. for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” But the law also says that person must be returned to DHS custody “when the purposes of such parole shall have been served.”
So a migrant arrested in the desert for illegally crossing the southern border who was suffering from dehydration could be taken to an American hospital and given care. But once that person is better, the law says DHS must return him or her to custody and begin the deportation process.
Biden is abusing this emergency provision to let in hundreds of thousands of migrants a year from around the world. No “urgent humanitarian reason” or “significant public benefit” is ever identified for migrants, and the Biden administration makes no effort to find, let alone detain them, once their parole status expires, which he usually sets at two years.
In addition to the migrants Biden is letting in at southern border ports of entry, he is also flying tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens into the country every month through his CHNV program. Like Biden’s parole program, the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela program has no solid statutory basis. Nothing in federal law identifies those countries as places from which inadmissible aliens may fly into the U.S., and nothing caps the numbers admitted every month at 30,000, the way Biden does. The entire program is a legal fiction created out of whole cloth by the Democrats.
Importantly, every migrant in the U.S. due to Biden’s CBP One app and CHNV program is as illegal as Jose Ibarra, the illegal immigrant charged with killing Laken Riley. Ibarra was arrested for illegally crossing the southern border in September 2022 and released into the U.S. by Biden on parole. The legal authority used to release him where he could kill Riley is the same legal authority used to parole inadmissible aliens through the CBP One app and CHNV program. There is no legal difference between the two.
What the parole programs accomplish is that they allow Democrats and their media allies to say inadmissible aliens entered the country “legally” and have a “legal status.”
But although they may have a thimble of “legal status,” they are still inadmissible aliens. When their temporary parole status expires, they will be every bit an illegal immigrant as every other illegal immigrant who sneaked into the country.
According to the latest Census, not only is the foreign-born population in the U.S. at a record high, thanks to Biden’s parole programs, but it is also growing at a record-high rate. No one ever voted for this, and Congress certainly did not approve it. Consequently, the percentage of voters who say they want less, not more, immigration is higher than it’s been in decades.
In theory, migrants paroled into the U.S. must return home after the purpose of their parole is over. But Biden and Harris have no intention of returning any of their parolees back to their home countries, ever.
Instead, the Democrats are creating a permanent underclass of quasi-legal migrants with uncertain futures. This permanent underclass will drive down wages while driving up the costs of housing, education, and healthcare.
Congress never approved this massive shadow immigration system. Its existence is an attack not just on our sovereignty as a nation but on our ability to rule ourselves democratically.
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For all her tough talk about border security, Harris has never condemned this shadow immigration system. And she won’t. She supports it.
The only way to make sure it ends is to make sure she never enters the White House.