Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s (R-GA) legislation to force the federal government to make public the number of illegal immigrants from “special interest” countries arrested at U.S. borders will be voted on Wednesday evening in the House.
The bill would require the Department of Homeland Security to release statistics monthly on the number of illegal immigrants from certain countries that pose national security threats to the United States, as well as the area of the border where they were apprehended.
Greene introduced the bill in January as the yearslong border crisis that erupted during the Biden administration was coming to an end. Under former President Joe Biden, more than 10 million illegal immigrants were arrested by Border Patrol agents after attempting to enter the U.S., the majority of whom were released into the country without adequate vetting.
The Biden-era border crisis not only went beyond previous surges in illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border in terms of the duration and number of people seen, but also by the origin of certain countries seen at such high volumes, specifically China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria.
The DHS defines a “special interest alien” as a “non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests.”
“The Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous policies placed the United States in an extremely vulnerable national security position over the past four years,” Greene said Monday in a speech before the House Committee on Rules. “Customs and Border Protection faced an unprecedented number of special interest aliens from 26 countries that the Department of Homeland Security has determined pose the greatest national security and counterintelligence threats.”
Border agents encountered 1.7 million people from special interest countries during the Biden administration. Of that figure, 1,500 Iranian nationals were nabbed at the border, and half of them were let into the U.S.
However, the DHS did not release those figures on “special interest aliens” under Biden — the data were only reported due to leaks obtained by the media.
CBP releases data monthly about the number of illegal immigrants that its Border Patrol agents apprehended attempting to enter the country, as well as some nationalities and demographics of those figures. Limited information on suspected or known terrorists caught at the border is also released every month. “Special interest alien” figures are not a part of that data release.
“The American people deserve to see data similar to the information on the terrorist screening data set,” Greene said Tuesday. “Releasing encounter statistics on special interest aliens would not include sensitive information, but general encounter information, which increases the transparency and accountability that are critical to the health of our constitutional republic. After all, it’s the American people that pay for the government because they’re the taxpayers. They deserve to know.”
The DHS would also be required to publish monthly “special interest alien” statistics as early as January 2021, when Biden took office.
The House Homeland Security Committee passed Greene’s bill in a 15-12 vote in April.
Democrats who attended the April bill markup said the legislation would divulge sensitive information to the public, including criminals and cartels who could use it to their benefit.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), top Democrat on the committee, said at the time that the Trump administration ought to consider how information could be safely published without putting national security at risk in the way he claimed Greene’s bill would.
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“Democrats went to San Diego,” Thompson said. “We heard from the professionals last weekend about many of these issues, and one of the things we did learn is their protocols need to be kept a secret in order to be effective. If we’re going to publish these special interest aliens, then that tells [the cartels] how they need to move people from other countries to here.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who also voted against the bill, insisted that “this kind of information only helps the enemy, it does not stop them.”