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Mayorkas Says Biden’s New Border Rules Leave Many Open Gaps

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President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is rebuking pro-migration advocates for making demands that threaten Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.

“This is about governing,” border chief Alejandro Mayorkas told a pro-migration university lawyer who objected to the administration’s new curbs on unpopular border migration.

Mayorkas outlined the many exceptions and loopholes in the promised curbs, and he urged progressives to manage their own ambitions:

 It is about taking one’s ideals, taking one’s ambitions, in seeking to realize those ideals, and meeting the moment, the reality with that we confront … How do you propose that we handle 8,000 people each day when we are not [funded by Congress] for that?

“We’ve done so much and we have so much more to do that we will do,” the Cuban-born Mayorkas said during the March 15 interview with Ahilan Arulanantham, a former ACLU lawyer who now runs the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.

Pro-migration progressives want even more migration in 2023 and 2024, regardless of the damage to Americans.

“I want the world that President Biden defended in the [2020] debates,” said Arulanantham:

[Biden] said when families come here, we should have the capacity to bring them in and protect them … I want the world where we treat everyone [emphasis added] like we treat Ukrainians, and we don’t worry about whether it will overwhelm the system.

Arulanantham is the U.S.-born son of migrants from Sri Lanka who were welcomed into the United States. For two decades, he has made a career by championing more migration from Sri Lanka and other countries.

Arulanantham’s demand for easy global migration is shared by many elite layers and business advocates who deeply resent President Donald Trump’s wage-raising enforcement of the nation’s border laws. Those wealthy progressives profit from migration and are an important part of Biden’s voting and donor base.

Biden’s migration policy has been very good for wealthy interests.

He has imported roughly 4.2 million people across the southern border,  in addition to the inflow of roughly 1 million legal immigrants and 1 million temporary workers each year. This huge flood of workers, renters, and consumers aids investors by lowering the hourly wages — and inflating the price of housing — that are needed by the roughly 4 million young Americans who enter the job market each year.

Legislators in Congress do not want to be seen supporting such a huge and unpopular inflow. Mayorkas told the lawyers that Congress does not want to fund the high level of migration that he and they prefer. “I was given a recommendation to seek money from Congress,” Mayorkas said in response to Arulanantham’s plea for more border migrants.  “That is not particularly helpful — I’ve tried that,” he added.

But Biden is not promising to end this politically risky and unpopular southern inflow.

Instead, his team is trying to reduce the risk by announcing deceptive curbs that do very little to reduce migration.

Immigrants warm to a fire at dawn after spending the night outside next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence on December 22, 2022 in El Paso, Texas. A spike in the number of migrants seeking asylum in the United States has challenged local, state and federal authorities. The numbers are expected to increase as the fate of the Title 42 authority to expel migrants remains in limbo pending a Supreme Court decision expected after Christmas. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Immigrants warm to a fire at dawn after spending the night outside next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence on December 22, 2022 in El Paso, Texas. A spike in the number of migrants seeking asylum in the United States has challenged local, state and federal authorities. (John Moore/Getty)

The first apparent curb is the decision to stop the cross-border inflow of people from four countries — Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that “parole pathway” plan simply diverts the migrants to airports so they can fly directly from their home countries to job offers and apartment rentals in America.

The second is a draft policy that would apparently curb asylum applications by migrants crossing from Mexico. But it contains so many exemptions that it likely will stop few migrants.

Both policies are being described by establishment media sites as successful curbs on illegal migration. For example, CBS News’s Colombian-born reporter declared on March 14:

El Paso, Texas — Unlawful crossings along the U.S. southern border in February remained at a two-year low for the second consecutive month, illustrating the dent that stricter policies enacted by President Biden this year have made on the unprecedented migration flows recorded since he took office.

“Biden takes heat for border measures, but illegal crossings are down,” said a March 15 Washington Post article that detailed complaints from pro-migration groups.

But this favorable media coverage also means that Mayorkas has to talk down the progressives who oppose even symbolic or temporary curbs on migration into Americans’ increasingly chaotic society of poor workers, wealthy investors, and a shrinking middle class.

Mayorkas has credibility among the open-border progressives.

He is a Cuban-born pro-migration zealot who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity, which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’ demands imply equity between U.S. citizens and foreign citizens, and he has opened many loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States.

So Mayorkas used his interview to corral the pro-migration zealots behind Biden.

For example, Arulanantham claimed that “the administration has promulgated a rule that would limit asylum.”

“That’s an inaccurate summary,” Mayorkas replied.

“What we’re trying to do is incentivize a lawful, safe, and orderly way to make that claim and disincentivize the [cartel] treachery that we see in between the ports of entry,” he said,

Mayorkas then described the loopholes and exemptions in the apparent curbs on asylum-seeking migrants:

So what we have done is we have issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to solicit comments …. The proposed rule provides that if one wants to make a claim for asylum in the United States, then one can make an appointment through a mobile [cellphone] app, CBP One …

If they have not made a claim of asylum [in a country they travelled through] … they are not banned from seeking asylum, they encounter a rebuttable presumption of ineligibility that they can overcome.

…

There are exceptions in the proposed rule. If one for example, has no access to CBP One [agency online portal] … if one is in imminent risk of danger by reason of the threat that one seeks to escape, [or] an acute vulnerability, an urgent medical or other humanitarian exemptions.

And we’re soliciting public comment to see whether this rule should indeed be promulgated, and if so, how it should be changed.

Currently, about 20,000 migrants per month — or 240,000 per year — are being let into the United States after using the CBP One app.

Mayorkas also explained the parole pathway in the supposed border blockage against migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela:

So what we did was, we established a parole program for people from those [four country] populations who can apply [online] for relief in the United States … If they are approved, they can travel safely by plane here … We’ve seen a tremendous uptick in the number of people using the parole program.

Mayorkas’s deputies are allowing an inflow of 360,000 migrants from the four countries.

This combined Mayorkas inflow adds up to roughly 600,000 migrants — or 60 percent above the annual cap of 1 million legal migrants set by Congress.

Advocates for American solidarity criticize Mayorkas’ pro-migrant policies.

“The Biden administration has basically moved a lot of people — who might otherwise have crossed the border illegally — off the books … [so] they don’t appear on the illegal border-crossing tally” each month, Ira Mehlman, the media director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform told Breitbart News. He continued:

The objective is just to get as many people in here as they possibly can, knowing that once people are here, then the odds are that they’re going tostay. Obviously, the migrants themselves get something out of it, their direct employers certainly get something out of it, but it comes at the expense of pretty much everybody else.

On March 8, a federal judge declared Mayorkas’s parole pathway illegal. Mayorkas noted the decision in his comments to Arulanantham, who declined to ask Mayorkas what he would do next.

Similarly, Arulanantham declined to ask Mayorkas about his diplomatic deals with Mexico. The deals have been kept under tight wraps, but Mexico is reportedly regulating the flow of migrants to the U.S. border, and Mayorkas is reportedly allowing more Mexicans to travel through the border to get U.S. jobs.

Instead, Arulanantham asked him to adopt policies that would aid his foreign clients to gain access to Americans’ jobs and homes.

Mayorkas curtly rejected the request:

[The law] is not based on whether an individual here in the United States will benefit from the grant so that they can send remittances to their family and other people in need … I would explain to your clients and others that there’s a legal basis for Temporary Protected Status that we adhere to, because that is our obligation.

Mayorkas also reminded Arulanantham that Biden’s first two years of chaotic migration — which Arulanantham supported — has cost the lives of at least one thousand migrants:

What we did [in January] was we executed on an effort to build lawful, safe, and orderly pathways for individuals to come to the United States, to incentivize them to use those pathways. Frankly, [to] liberate them from the clutches of the smuggling organizations that wreak so much death and tragedy.

Mayorkas’ declared concern for migrants’ safety of migrants is sincere. But his concern is also subsidiary to his determination to pull many into the United States on his watch with the dangled offer of jobs for adults and teenagers, and free K-12 education for kids.

Extraction Migration:

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.

Con-Servatives: UK Net Migration to Remain in Hundreds of Thousands Despite Tory Promises

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Contrary to long-standing promises from Britain’s governing Conservative Party, net migration is expected to remain in the hundreds of thousands for the foreseeable future, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted this week.

In its list of Spring projections, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that net migration will remain at around 245,000 per year until at least the 2026/27 fiscal year, revising the estimate up by 40,000 more migrants compared to its previous release in November.

Alongside increases in refugee applications from Hong Kong and Ukraine, the statistician agency pointed to the post-Brexit points-based immigration system implemented by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a key factor in the continued high waves of migration, given that it failed to set a firm annual cap on migration.

However, in comments provided to Breitbart London, Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, suggested that annual arrivals over the coming years could actually be even higher: “The OBR’s assumption of net migration settling at 245,000 per annum has no basis. It was over half a million in the year to June 2022 and very likely to have been even higher for the whole of last year.”

“The expectation that it will be around a quarter of a million by 2026 is fantasy. It also suggests that the government has no intention of getting a grip of the scale of immigration, as the public want,” he explained.

“Failing to do so will only lead to further massive, unsustainable population increase, as happened in just 20 years when it was the prime driver of an eight million growth in our population.”

Despite many voters backing the Conservative Party in the 2019 election in the hopes of finally having a government free from European Union rules and able to actually reduce the number of migrants coming to the country, the opposite occurred, with a record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners and net migration hitting a record half a million last year — nearly doubling the peaks seen under the leftist Labour administration of Tony Blair.

Since the days of David Cameron’s premiership from 2010 to 2016, Conservative governments consistently paid lip service to the notion of reducing the number of migrants coming into the country, vowing to cut net migration in their 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019 election manifestos, yet numbers have only continued to increase.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said during last Summer’s leadership contest to replace Johnson — which he lost — that if put into office he would seek to reduce migration, but he refused to commit to a hard annual cap and has made no significant moves to restrict migration since being installed in Downing Street in a globalist-backed coup against the shortly-tenured Prime Minister Liz Truss.

While Home Secretary Suella Braverman has previously said that the government should fulfil its longstanding promise to the people to bring down net migration to “the tens of thousands”, her tenure in the Cabinet has so far been consumed with failed attempts to solve the illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel rather than tackle legal mass migration, despite it having far more impact on the demographic trajectory of the country.

Recent data from the once-in-a-decade Census also revealed that the percentage of native Britons in England and Wales had fallen below 75 per cent.

Despite promising to “take back control” of the nation’s borders, the foreign-born population rose from around 7.5 million a decade ago to around 10.4 million today — roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or around a sixth of the UK population overall.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

Cortez Masto: Biden Admin. Doing Some Things ‘That Are Too Harsh’ on Immigration

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During an interview with NPR aired on Friday’s broadcast of “Morning Edition,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) stated that there are some things that the Biden administration is doing on immigration that “are too harsh that are not helping us solve this problem,” and criticized proposals for a transit ban and family detention.

Host Steve Inskeep asked, [relevant exchange begins around 4:20] “It appears that Title 42 is going to expire, regardless, in May. And the administration has reportedly been talking about other measures that they can use — harsh measures in some cases — to deter people from crossing, things like family detention, for example. Would you favor harsher measures in place of Title 42 to keep down the flow?”

Cortez Masto responded, “No. And I’ve said this to the administration as well, with respect to family detention, it was wrong under Trump and it’s wrong now. There was a proposal for a transit ban, to me, again, wrong proposal. It’s a — that’s a piecemeal solution to a broken immigration system. So, there [are] things that they are doing that are too harsh that are not helping us solve this problem, when, in actuality, we could come together and figure out the right way to do this.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

Feb. Migrant Apprehensions Up 32 Percent from Biden’s First Full Month in Office

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Migrant apprehensions along the southwest border with Mexico in February remained at about the same level as January. The Biden Administration touts the reduction in apprehensions in January and February, but the numbers are still 32 percent higher than in February 2021 — President Joe Biden’s first full month in office.

Border Patrol agents in the nine southwest border sectors apprehended 128,877 migrants who crossed in February from Mexico into the U.S. between ports of entry. This is only 36 migrants less than the 128,913 apprehended in January. The Biden Administration credited the reduction from the nearly 222,000 December migrant apprehensions to the new CBP One mobile application. 

“The new border enforcement measures kept February’s overall encounter numbers nearly even with January,” said CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller in a written statement. “We are also encouraged by the new functionality in the CBP One mobile application, which has provided migrants the ability to safely and easily schedule an appointment at a Port of Entry to request a humanitarian exception to the Title 42 public health order. The app cuts out the smugglers and decreases migrant exploitation. CBP continues to make improvements to the app to address feedback we have received from stakeholders.”

What the commissioner did not say is the February report would have been a record-setting February were it not for the record set in 2022 when agents took 159,170 migrants into custody.

He also did not advise that this February’s apprehension report represents a 32 percent increase over February 2021 — Biden’s first full month in office. February 2021 was also the last month where agents apprehended less than 100,000 migrants in a single month.

The administration also reported a significant increase in the apprehension of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border or were sometimes abandoned along the border by human smugglers. This number rose from 9,382 unaccompanied minors in January to 10,870 in February — and increase of 16 percent.

“During February, 22,755 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (including immediate family members where applicable) were paroled into the country by the CBP Office of Field Operations through the parole processes established for Venezuelans in October and expanded to the additional nationalities in January,” CBP officials reported. “Arrivals of noncitizens via these processes, which include careful vetting and require a supporter present in the United States, are a testament to the benefit of these lawful processes in promoting safe and orderly migration while reducing encounters along the southwest border.”

Members of Congress never voted to approve or implement this new blanket parole program created in January by the Biden Administration.

The numbers reported in the February Southwest Land Border Encounters Report released Wednesday afternoon by CBP officials do not include the record-setting apprehensions of migrants in the Swanton Sector along the Canadian border or the Miami Sectors. These two sectors reported increases of 945 and 507 percent respectively.

The numbers also do not include the estimated nearly 51,000 known got-aways — migrants estimated to have crossed the border but who were not apprehended by Border Patrol agents.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.

White House Won’t Appeal Florida Court Killing Huge ‘Parole Pathway’

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President Joe Biden’s deputies have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s decision that kills their unprecedented “parole pathway” for a huge population of economic migrants.

The decision is likely a gamble that a pending Supreme Court case will nullify the March 8 decision by Florida-based district court Judge T. Ken Wetherell, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies.

“We need to see how it plays out,” Andrew told Breitbart News, adding:

Keep in mind Texas vs United States is pending before the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court says you can’t vacate an action under Title II, then this [Wetherell] decision goes away anyway. This is a “vacatur,” and [Wetherell] says “Look, I understand that this is an open question, [and] the Supreme Court is going to decide [it], and this will change my order if they decide I can’t issue a vacatur.”

The Supreme Court is expected to decide the United States vs Texas case by the end of July. The case deals with judges’ authority to intervene when administrations argue that they cannot enforce a law.

The decision is a big win for Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, who argued Biden’s catch-and-release policy violates federal law and imposes economic burdens on the state.

The White House’s decision to not appeal Wetherell’s decision was published by the Miami Herald:

Biden administration has declined to appeal a decision from last week that blocks a key Department of Homeland Security program that has helped the agency relieve migrant congestion at the U.S. southern border

In his March 8 decision, Wetherell wrote that Biden and his deputies have converted Americans’ border:

…[into] little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country by prioritizing “alternatives to detention” [ATD] over actual detention and by releasing more than a million aliens into the country—on “parole” or pursuant to the exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” under a wholly inapplicable statute—without even initiating removal proceedings.

The “parole+ATD” decision knocks down central tools of Biden’s pro-migration border policy and exposes migration problems that Biden wanted to hide in the 2024 election. Those self-inflicted problems include Biden’s planned take-down of the Title 42 border barrier in May.

Biden’s policies are being used to counter four political problems created by his campaign promise to end President Donald Trump’s border rules.

Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s progressive, pro-migration border chief, is dangling the “Parole+ATD” quasi-legal pathways to divert the flood of Biden migrants in Mexico from the chaotic cartel-run routes. This diversion is intended to keep the border crush off the evening news during the 2024 election.

Mayorkas is also trying to aid the Democrats’ business wing, which expects many additional migrant workers, renters, and consumers above the roughly one million per year level approved by Congress in 1990. He told CNN on March 7:

We need immigration … I’ve engaged extensively with the business community. There are 10 million open jobs. There’s a [business] clamoring for individuals to fill them.

The pathways also are a political gift to the Democrats’ progressive wing, which argues their “equity” goal means foreigners have as much right as Americans to jobs and housing in the United States.

The policy is also used to create a new path for Mexican migrant workers. That gift provides Mexico’s government with an incentive to suppress the cartel’s chaotic delivery of their migrants to the U.S. border. If the U.S. cannot operate the Mexican parole pathway, then Biden’s deputies will have fewer levers to encourage Mexico to help hide the massive parole migration.

The “Parole+ATD” pathway struck down by the judge was intended to annually welcome at least 240,000 migrants who travel into Mexico.

But Mayorkas created a second parole pathway in January to admit roughly 360,000 more migrants each year flown in from four major countries.

In January, “we created [parole] pathways for [360,000] individuals [annually] from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela,” to migrate into the United States, Mayorkas told CNN in an interview broadcast on March 7. He continued:

The population of those countries, the individuals coming from those countries, whom we encounter at our southern border has dropped more than 95 percent [because of the safer and cheaper parole pathway]. Remarkably, by the way, that successful program is being challenged in the courts. In Texas and elsewhere. And it mystifies me why, if there’s a complaint about the number of encounters, why someone would attack, a solution that is proving so successful,

The second parole pathway is facing a second lawsuit from Florida and 19 other states.

Judge Wetherell’s decision also aimed Biden’s broad use of the parole pathway — so bolstering the lawsuit against the four-country parole pathway:

The Court concludes that [Biden’s parole policy] is contrary to law in three ways: (1) it does not contemplate a return to custody once the purposes of parole have been served; (2) it does not comply with the case-by-case requirement; and (3) it does not limit parole to urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.

Overall, the two pathways would raise immigration levels by 60 percent above Congress’s cap, or to about one migrant for every two American births annually.

The ATD and parole policies encourage and enable economic migration for poor countries in Central America, Africa, and elsewhere.

They enable migration because they reassure poor foreigners that they will be able to easily migrate into U.S. jobs that pay off their debts to the criminal smugglers. Economic migration would largely stop if migrants believed they would not be able to get the U.S. jobs they need to repay their smuggling debts.

The case is Florida v. United States of America, 3:21-cv-1066-TKW-ZCB, in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida.