With his dismal track record, will Congress and the country again allow Sen. Schumer to sell America a mass amnesty for farmworkers? Will we again accept his baseless assurances as to the consequences of his grand schemes? Let's hope the answer is no.
Biden Seeking Billions to Pay for His Border Disaster
With no end in sight, you better open your checkbook for migrants expecting a free ride
The U.S. government is running out of money, as a continuing resolution (CR) temporarily funding federal operations — passed on September 30 — is due to expire on December 16. Republicans will take over control of the House in January, and many in the GOP are calling for a short-term CR in lieu of a full-year “omnibus” budget that will give the party more control over spending in FY 2023. While all that’s going on, the White House wants billions to paper over its border disaster, which has no end in sight.
“Power of the Purse”. The Founding Fathers laid out a map Congress still follows in funding the federal government, and gave the House of Representatives an outsized role in the process.
Among Congress’ enumerated powers in Article I, section 8, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution is the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”, commonly known as the “Spending Clause”.
Then, there is Article I, section 8, clause 7, which states, in part: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”. Thus, even if the executive branch has some extra cash lying around, it cannot spend it except in accordance with appropriations made by Congress.
Next is the “origination clause” in Article I, section 7. It provides: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives”. That has been interpreted to mean that all spending bills must arise in the House, as well, and it’s not for nothing that James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58:
The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse. ... This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
Budget Process, in Brief. The budget process begins when the president sends a budget request for the next fiscal year to Congress, which is supposed to be due on the first Monday in February.
Congress then drafts a budget resolution (passed by both Houses but not sent to the president for signature), setting forth the parameters of its spending plan. This process is supposed to be completed by April 15, but that does not always happen. That budget resolution includes what is known as a “302(a) allocation”, which is an overall cap on discretionary spending.
Thereafter, the appropriations committees in the House and Senate start work on funding the government. There are 12 separate subcommittees in the two chambers, each of which has “responsibility for developing one regular annual appropriations bill to provide funding for departments and activities within its jurisdiction”.
They are supposed to pass their individual appropriations bills by October 1, but that rarely happens. Usually (of late) appropriations are rolled into one large bill (an Omnibus) or into a CR to keep the cash spigot on.
Current Funding and the Administration’s “Assumptions”. Which brings me to the current funding cycle. Congress hasn’t passed its appropriations bills and is scrambling to avoid a federal shutdown when the current CR expires on December 16. Politico reports that key leaders in the two parties “are still tens of billions of dollars apart on a total amount for domestic programs”.
“Without a deal”, the outlet explains, “congressional leaders have warned that federal agencies could be saddled with stagnant budgets for the better part of 2023, an outcome that Pentagon leaders have said would be devastating for military readiness and U.S. assistance to Ukraine.”
Concerned that budgets will be flat for the current fiscal year (FY 2023), the White House sent its “FY 2023 Full-Year Continuing Resolution Assumptions” to the Hill on December 5.
The current CR includes $1.383 billion for what it terms “Southwest Border Management”, providing “operations and support” for ICE and CBP and “federal assistance” for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The White House asserts that it will need a whopping $4.865 billion for these programs, or $3.482 billion over what the current CR provides. The justification for that request explains:
DHS requires additional funding in FY 2023 for management of the southwest border. Funding would be required for CBP border processing ($2 billion), ICE transportation, removal, detention, and Alternatives to Detention ($2 billion), and FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter — Humanitarian grants ($820 million).
CBP Border Processing. There is a lot to unpack there, but I will start with CBP’s “border processing” request.
Joe Biden inherited what his first Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, described in a September 2021 letter to Senate leadership as “arguably the most effective border security in” U.S. history.
Scott complained, however, that Biden quickly allowed things at the border to “disintegrate” as “inexperienced political appointees” ignored “common sense border security recommendations from experienced career professionals”.
The former chief did not go into detail about what those “recommendations” entailed, but Biden quickly ended most of the successful border policies that his predecessor had put into place to bring control to the border.
Most importantly, the new president first suspended and then allowed his DHS secretary to end (twice) the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico”.
MPP allowed DHS to return non-Mexican aliens who had entered the United States illegally back across the border to await hearings on their asylum claims.
An October 2019 DHS assessment of the program determined that Remain in Mexico was “an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border and restoring integrity to the immigration system”, particularly as related to alien families. Asylum cases were expedited under the program, and MPP removed incentives for aliens to make weak or bogus claims when apprehended.
Then-candidate Joe Biden derided MPP during his 2020 presidential campaign, and his administration has been fighting an effort by state plaintiffs in federal court since April 2021 to force DHS to reinstate the program — thus far successfully, albeit largely on technical grounds.
Keep in mind that a month before taking office, Biden had promised to reverse those Trump policies but averred that he would do so “at a slower pace than he initially promised, to avoid winding up with ‘2 million people on our border’” and only after erecting “guardrails” to prevent a border surge.
No such guardrails were ever implemented. Consequently, Border Patrol agents have been facing a human tsunami at the Southwest border since Biden took office, setting new yearly records for apprehensions there in FY 2021 (when they stopped nearly 1.66 million illegal entrants), and again in FY 2022, as apprehensions soared past 2.2 million.
That has left agents stuck transporting, processing, and caring for aliens who have surrendered in droves in the (reasonable) expectation they will be released, and thus rendered Border Patrol unable to stop a flood of drugs and other illegal entrants who have no intention of getting caught.
How bad is that problem? In FY 2021, there were an estimated 389,000 “got-aways”, illegal migrants who successfully evaded agents and made their way into the United States, as well as an additional 599,000 in FY 2022. Fox News reports that there have been 137,000 got-aways in just the first two months of FY 2023, including a record number (73,000-plus) in November alone.
That’s unsustainable, but note that the White House’s CR assumptions only talk about CBP “processing” those aliens, not removing them.
That’s because, as I have explained elsewhere, the administration has largely refused to use the most important tool Congress gave DHS — expedited removal — to quickly remove aliens who have entered illegally. Instead, its fallback position is to release those aliens into the United States, where they will remain indefinitely, if not forever.
Biden did, however, keep one quasi-border policy implemented by the Trump administration: expulsion of illegal entrants pursuant to CDC orders issued under Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Even then, however, Biden attempted to end Title 42 on May 23, despite DHS warnings that up to 18,000 aliens would cross the Southwest border illegally per day once Title 42 ended, up from an already unsustainable average of just over 6,045 per day in FY 2022.
The administration was stymied in that effort by a federal judge who enjoined the end of Title 42 in an order issued on May 20, but unfortunately (for those interested in national security or sovereignty) a separate federal judge in November ordered the government to end Title 42 on December 21.
Given that, the Biden administration should be reconsidering those Trump border policies, but it’s not, instead asking Congress in the CR for $2 billion for CBP “processing” of illegal entrants.
ICE Funding. As noted, the White House is also asking Congress to give ICE $2 billon for “transportation, removal, detention, and Alternatives to Detention” to deal with the disaster Biden has created at the Southwest border.
Notably, the administration fails to explain how much of that funding would go to detention or removal. In section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Congress mandates that DHS detain all illegal entrants, from the point they are apprehended until they are either granted asylum or removed. Given that, additional funding for detention and removal to extricate the country from this mess is appropriate.
The Biden administration has largely ignored that detention mandate, however, releasing into the United States (by my estimates) more than 1.5 million aliens who were apprehended at the Southwest border, and more than 89,000 in October alone.
Why has Congress mandated that such “arriving aliens” be detained? As DHS explained in its October 2019 MPP assessment, aliens use non-meritorious asylum claims as a “free ticket into the United States”, and once Remain in Mexico denied them immediate entry, they began to go home.
The same is true of detention. It keeps aliens safe and provides for their needs while they make their way through the asylum system, but it also denies them the ability to live and work here until they are actually granted asylum.
Despite those facts, and even though it’s facing a massive wave of illegal entrants, the Biden administration has allowed ICE detention spaces to sit empty while asking Congress to cut the number of detention beds the agency has available to it in the president’s FY 2023 budget request.
In lieu of real detention, Biden has been opting instead for so-called Alternatives to Detention (ATD). Not only does ATD have no foundation in the INA, it doesn’t work and it’s more costly than detention itself.
Here’s the rub: In Supreme Court arguments on November 29 in U.S. v. Texas — a suit brought by states challenging administration “guidelines” that contravene congressional arrest and detention mandates for criminal aliens — the government argued it lacks detention space to comply with Congress’ directives, essentially blaming Congress for not giving it money.
Disingenuously, however, the administration is now seeking money for ATD, a program under which — by definition — aliens would not be detained. The justices will rule in Texas strictly on the law, but if I were them, I would be plenty steamed by this glaring incongruity.
It’s no wonder that Speaker-presumptive Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wants budget negotiators to hold off on full-year funding until the GOP takes the House budget reins in January.
FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter — Humanitarian Funding. Which brings me to the third item: the White House’s request for $820 million for FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program — Humanitarian (EFSP-H).
In September, I explained that ESFP began as a Reagan-administration program to help homeless vets, the elderly, and the handicapped, but has now transmogrified into a grant program (ESFP-H) to private and governmental organizations that feed, shelter, and transport illegal migrants released by DHS at the border.
When I wrote that, the Biden administration was “just” asking for $154 million for ESFP-H in FY 2023, but as the humanitarian border disaster it created has spun even further out of control, it now wants five times that amount, or about $122 million more than the total budgetary resources of the U.S. Export-Import Bank.
Democratic mayors have complained of late about efforts by the Republican governors of Texas and Arizona to bus a few thousand migrants released by DHS in those states to their “sanctuary” cities, but this request shows how misplaced such grumblings have been.
The Biden administration has transported many times the number of aliens that those governors have, and if the president’s request for $820 million in ESFP-H funding is approved, that endeavor will simply be turbocharged.
Of course, that will simply encourage even more foreign nationals to venture to the border, fed by tales of those who have gone before about the U.S. government’s accommodations and largesse.
A Better Idea. You will note that neither the Trump administration nor any presidency that preceded it ever had to go to Congress and demand billions of dollars to deal with record border surges.
That’s because every president before Biden had a policy of deterring illegal entrants, as my colleague Mark Krikorian recently explained. As he put it, “This administration ... is the first in our nation’s history to reject the very idea of deterring illegal immigration”.
Unless Biden takes steps to reduce the number of migrants entering the United States illegally by detaining them or — alternatively — returning them back across the border to await their hearings, the situation will just get worse. Until then, taxpayers better open their checkbooks because bus tickets don’t buy themselves and those migrants will be expecting a free ride — literally and metaphorically.
LYING GAMER LAWYERS!
Schumer, Architect of the Most Fraud-Ridden Immigration Program in U.S. History, May Do It Again
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Senators Michael Bennet and Mike Crapo are attempting to put together an amnesty for illegal alien farmworkers that can pass both the Senate and House in the lame duck session and get enacted into law before Republicans take control of the House in January. Of course, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer would have to agree to such a scheme.
Congress has not pulled this off since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986’s (IRCA) “special agricultural worker” (SAW) amnesty program provided temporary and later permanent legal status for aliens who had performed seasonal agricultural work in the U.S. for at least 90 days during the 12 months ending on May 1, 1986. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the SAW program gave amnesty to 1,077,000 illegal aliens (out of 1,278,000 applicants) as of August 12, 1992.
Notoriously, the SAW program was “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States Government”, as Roberto Suro, now Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, concluded in the New York Times in 1989.
How did SAW come about, and why was it so flawed? The blame for the SAW debacle rests largely with Senator Schumer. He had a leading role in devising the program as a member of the House of Representatives at the time. He himself remarked at a Judiciary Committee markup of the legislation that:
The area that I particularly labored in [was to] come up with a compromise on agriculture. . . . That is the sine qua non of any kind of compromise on [immigration legislation], because it is no secret that . . . the agriculture provisions . . . has [d]one in this bill more than once.
Mr. Schumer was also up-front about the fact that his SAW amnesty was specifically designed to meet the needs of special interests. He stated at the markup that:
Significantly, with this compromise, we have harnessed the same special interests who formerly opposed immigration reform and now have their support in working for a bill. . . . [W]e have met the needs of special interests without sacrificing the general interests which propel immigration reform.
Scholars agree that Schumer’s SAW program was the key to getting IRCA, and its mass amnesty, across the finish line. University of Maryland Professor James Gimpel and James Edwards, Jr., write in their book "The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform" that:
In the full [House Judiciary] committee, the sticking point [for IRCA] proved to be the farm worker program. Labor-connected Democrats insisted that foreign guest-workers would have an adverse impact on the wages and working conditions of domestic workers. But influential Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee . . . had insisted on a farm worker program as a condition for supporting the bill. Arguments about the farm worker program had stalled the legislation in 1984. Fearing that the bill could die without an agricultural provision, Judiciary Committee Democrats Howard Berman (D-CA) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) drafted an amendment to grant permanent resident status to agricultural workers who had been employed at least 60 days between May 1985 and May 1986.
According to the Congressional Research Service (in a report prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee):
The issue of seasonal agricultural labor continued to dominate consideration . . . in part because of [Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter] Rodino’s objection to a large-scale guest worker program as being exploitive of both domestic and alien workers. . . . [A] group of Congressmen had begun trying to devise a compromise alternative to a guest worker program. The key members of this group as it evolved were Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), and Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Calif). Their task was to arrive at a program which would be satisfactory to both the influential and well-funded agricultural interests, and to those opposed to a large temporary guest worker program. . . . The issue . . . dominated House Judiciary markup . . . [T]he bill reported by the full Committee included . . . . the Schumer amendment, drafted after months of negotiations . . . . [When the bill reached the House floor, further] intensive bipartisan negotiations . . . led to a successful compromise . . . . [that] made House consideration of the bill possible . . . . President Reagan signed [IRCA] into law . . . on November 6, 1986 . . . .
Monica Heppel, who was Director of Research for the U.S. Commission on Agricultural Workers, and Sandra Amendola write in their book "Immigration Reform and Perishable Crop Agriculture: Compliance Or Circumvention?", that:
With immigration reform . . . stalled . . . Schumer . . . attempted to develop an acceptable compromise regarding agricultural labor. During most of 1986, key parties met in closed meetings in such an attempt. The primary stumbling block was the foreign farm worker provision. . . . The . . . compromise . . . eliminated any additional temporary worker program, but allowed for the legalization of undocumented workers currently employed in perishable crop agriculture, as well as provided for replacement agricultural workers . . . should the need arise. . . . Again resurrected, this bill included the slightly modified Schumer compromise . . . .
Finally, Daniel Tichenor writes in his book "Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America" that:
When the House reconvened in 1984, a number of young legislative entrepreneurs . . . worked behind closed doors to harmonize conflicting versions of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill. With the blessing of party leaders . . . junior members like . . . Schumer . . . and . . . Panetta . . . took the lead in trying to fashion a compromise package . . . . [including] efforts . . . to quietly devise a farmworker program that satisfied growers while meeting union demands for worker protection. . . . Finally, the House farmworker package was adopted as a compromise between grower labor interests and liberal demands for worker protection.
And, as to the fraud? Suro reported in the Times in 1989 that:
- [A] variety of estimates by Federal officials and immigration experts place the number of fraudulent [SAW] applications at somewhere between 250,000 and 650,000.
- Given the limited law-enforcement effort, no precise count of fraud in the agricultural amnesty program is possible. But some rough estimates are possible based on information from the aliens themselves. An extensive survey conducted in three rural Mexican communities by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California in San Diego found that only 72 percent of those who identified themselves as applicants for farm worker amnesty had work histories that qualified them for the program. A similar survey conducted by Mexican researchers in Jalisco in central Mexico found that only 59 percent qualified.
- The Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] has identified 398,000 cases of possible fraud in the program, but the agency admits that it lacks both the manpower and the money to prosecute individual applicants. . . .
- Evidence of vast abuse of the farm worker amnesty program has already led to important changes in the way immigration policies are conceived in Congress. . . . [R]ecent legislation . . . was modified specifically to avoid the uncontrolled influx that has occurred under the agricultural amnesty program.
- [A couple] pleaded guilty to immigration fraud charges after [INS] investigators alleged that the[y] were part of an operation that helped about 1,000 aliens acquire amnesty with falsified documents showing they had all worked on a mere 30 acres of farmland.
- John F. Shaw, [INS] Assistant Immigration Commissioner . . . . said law-enforcement efforts had been limited to the people who sold false documents to applicants for the farm worker amnesty. The immigration service has made 844 arrests and won 413 convictions in cases alleging fraud in the amnesty program. The people involved ranged from notaries public to field crew leaders. “It was a cottage industry . . . . It was a weak program and it was poorly articulated in the law[.]”
- Unlike almost all other immigration programs, which put the burden of proof on the applicant, the farm amnesty put the burden on the Government. Consequently, aliens with even the most rudimentary documentation cannot be rejected unless the Government can prove their claims are false.
- Mr. Shaw said the fraud conspiracies often involved farms that actually did employ some migrant labor. So it is frequently impossible to separate legitimate from illicit claims.
Heppel and Amendola observe that:
Recognizing that undocumented farm workers were likely to have worked for a number of different employers, possibly under assumed names, and for employers who might not have the required payroll and tax records, the documentation required in the application process for SAWs was substantially less rigorous than it was for general legalization applicants. . . . The extremely large number of SAW applicants surprised Congress, the INS . . . and almost all observers of farm labor in the United States. To explain the large number, most persons involved in the legalization process assume high rates of fraud in the SAW program. The ease with which application could be made is believed to have encouraged ineligible aliens to take this route to legalization. A study using California unemployment insurance . . . data indicated that, assuming the entire universe of SAW-eligible workers were undocumented, there should have been between 115,000 and 188,000 applicants in the state. . . . With over 650,000 applicants from California alone, the author concludes that there must have been an extremely high rate of fraud in the SAW program. Although they provide little evidence, INS officials have estimated an approximate 50 percent fraud rate in the overall SAW program.
The U.S. Commission on Agricultural Workers reported that:
[M]any observers assume that . . . there were high rates of fraud in the SAW program as a result of the relative ease with which applications could be made. . . . [T]he number of applications filed far exceeded all planning assumptions. The official administration estimate of the number of undocumented workers in agriculture was 300,000-500,000, developed by [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] during the IRCA debates in 1983. Most other estimates fell within that range. The INS planned on 800,000 SAW applicants. The more than 1.27 million SAW applications filed . . . overwhelmed the system. . . . Many aliens who did not qualify for either the general or the [SAW] legalization programs . . chose to probe the more ‘vulnerable’ of the two programs. They opted for filing a SAW application. With some luck, eventual U.S. permanent resident status could be gained through the purchase of a single fraudulent affidavit and the ability to maintain one’s composure in an interview. . . . [T]he Government was sorely taxed by its burden of disproving the evidence presented in each application. There is widespread consensus among observers and analysts, regardless of political persuasion, that there was significant fraud in the SAW program. Assessing the magnitude of this fraud – or even its range – is an inherently difficult exercise. . . .
University of California, David, professor Philip Martin observed in 1990 that while “the extent of SAW fraud is impossible to determine”, data suggested that half to two-thirds of applications may have been fraudulent. A decade later, he concluded that “at least half of those who became immigrants through the SAW program did not satisfy the requirement that they performed at least 90 days of farm work in 1985-86.” Martin also noted that “applicants . . . proved willing to pay several hundred dollars for [affidavits] from employers . . . the business of selling false employment histories mushroomed[]” and applicants made preposterous claims such as having climbed trees to pick strawberries.
The 9/11 Commission’s staff report noted that Mahmud Abouhalima, a participant in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, received SAW status after claiming to have picked beans in Florida.
This sorry history of fraud was preceded by Mr. Schumer’s promise during the markup that fraud would not be a problem:
[T]he bill . . . is tough on fraud. There are rigorous criminal penalties for aliens making fraudulent applications, which ultimately permanently exclude offenders from entry into the United States. In addition, we have given the Attorney General . . . the authority to review green card applications, and we fully expect the government to be tough in its assessment of these applications.
By 1989, Schumer had sort of admitted he had been mistaken. Suro reported that Schumer “said that in retrospect the program seemed ‘too open’ and susceptible to fraud. But he argued that budget decisions had made the battle to combat fraud more difficult.” Schumer promised that “in developing immigration policies in the future, Congress will be much more wary of the potential for fraud and will do more to stop it.” Gee, thanks, Mr. Schumer.
Though, in all fairness, it might simply be impossible to design a farmworker amnesty that isn’t fraud ridden. Stephen Rosenbaum, staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, points out that “there was no other way to structure an immigration program for an occupation ‘that does not produce a paper trail.’ . . . You can argue the wisdom of a farm worker amnesty, but if you have one, you have to recognize the immense logistical problems involved in producing evidence”.
Just about every other prediction Schumer made about the SAW program likewise turned out to be false. He claimed during the markup that the program would “shut[] off one of the prime magnets to illegal immigration: an agricultural job.” As it turned out, SAW actually encouraged illegal immigration. The U.S. Commission on Agricultural Workers later found that:
[T]he SAW program . . . appears to have formed the foundation for continued illegal immigration through the following factors: (1) by facilitating the settlement of immigrants in the United States, thereby increasing the number of “anchor” households whose presence facilitates the transition into U.S. work and society for future authorized and unauthorized immigrants, (2) by facilitating cyclical migration, thereby reducing the costs for unauthorized immigrants to journey .north and enter the United States with legally returning SAWs; (3) by stimulating unauthorized family unification in the United States as spouses join their husbands in the agricultural labor force; and (4) by “sending the message” that the route to legal status comes through illegal entry into the United States.
Schumer also claimed during the markup that:
“The bottom line, my colleagues on this committee, is that the number of workers involved in the [SAW] plan are small compared with overall legalization . . . or compared with the millions of illegal immigrants coming across our borders at an increasingly rapid rate.”
Lastly, Schumer claimed that the SAW recipients would not abandon jobs in agriculture, stating in the markup that:
[I]t is the assumption of just about every party that I have talked to, the vast majority of them will continue to work in agriculture, for the very reason, first of all, that they have done it before; second of all, that there are not large employment opportunities in the cities; and third, that they have – most people tend to work in jobs for which they have the skill and for which they are accustomed to. So that it is my guess, and it is only a guess, it is anyone’s guess, that you will find an extremely high percentage of people continuing to work in agriculture.
Again, the actual outcome was quite different. Professor Martin finds that:
The exit of SAWs from the farm workforce since the early 1990s reflects [the fact that] falling real wages and shrinking benefits encouraged SAWs to seek non-farm jobs as the economy improved in the 1990s. The SAWs who left farm work were replaced by newly arrived unauthorized migrants. By 1997-98, it was estimated that SAWs were [only] about 16% of crop workers, and that half of the farm workers on crop farms were unauthorized.
With his dismal track record, will Congress and the country again allow Sen. Schumer to sell America a mass amnesty for farmworkers? Will we again accept his baseless assurances as to the consequences of his grand schemes? Let's hope the answer is no.
7400 Migrants Cross Mexican Border to El Paso over Weekend
El Paso Sector Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 7,400 migrants who crossed the border from Mexico, mostly to the city of El Paso, over the weekend. Border Patrol officials called it a “major surge” in an already overwhelmed sector of the border.
“Breaking!” El Paso Sector Chief Patrol Agent Peter Jaquez said in a tweet on Monday. “Over the weekend, the El Paso Sector experienced a major surge in illegal crossings, with a 3-day average of 2,460 daily encounters, primarily through the downtown area of El Paso.”
Multiplying the 2,460 daily average migrant encounters puts the total for the weekend at 7,380 migrants who mostly entered the city of El Paso. These numbers may be understated as agents must continue to process arriving migrants who may not yet be included in the early reports.
Photos tweeted by Jaquez show the massive numbers and subsequent overcrowding as Border Patrol agents attempt to find someplace to put and process the migrants. Most of these migrants will likely be released to NGOs or onto the streets of El Paso.
The tweet from the El Paso chief confirms reports Monday morning from multiple news outlets that a record-setting single group of more than 1,000 migrants crossed into El Paso during the overnight hours.
The Border Patrol Central Processing Center in El Paso is currently over capacity with more than 5,100 in custody on Monday, the news outlet stated. The capacity of the facility is approximately 3,500 migrants.
A live dashboard operated by the City of El Paso shows 5,105 migrants currently in custody. The report shows the release into the El Paso Community of 892 migrants with an additional 286 released onto the city’s streets.
Report: Biden’s DHS Arresting Fewer Illegal Aliens to Prep for Illegal Immigration Surge as Title 42 Ends
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is reportedly instructing agents to arrest fewer illegal aliens to prepare for a massive surge of illegal immigration as the Title 42 public health authority is set to end in days.
According to an exclusive report from the Washington Times‘s Stephen Dinan, top DHS officials have told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field agents to focus on arresting only illegal aliens with “class A” felony convictions. An ICE spokesperson denied the claim.
The goal, according to ICE agents who spoke to Dinan, is to free up detention space for a surge of illegal immigration that is expected when the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Title 42 authority ends in days.
Dinan reports:
Some ICE officers have been told to cut down on arrests of even serious criminals to free up detention bed space so the government has somewhere to put illegal immigrants caught at the border, The Washington Times has learned. [Emphasis added]
…
“We are being told to abandon detention of anyone without a class A felony like murder in preparation for border flights,” the officer said. It is the latest signal that the government is scrambling to try to accommodate what it expects to be a surge once the administration ends the pandemic Title 42 policy that allows some illegal immigrants at the border to be quickly ousted. [Emphasis added]
…
“To ensure they had room for planeloads, they told the field not to make any arrests unless it is an extreme severity charge,” the officer said. [Emphasis added]
Last month, a federal judge struck down Title 42 — the public health authority first imposed by former President Trump in 2020 that has helped stem waves of illegal immigration.
The Biden administration quickly asked the court for five weeks to end Title 42, ensuring that the authority will be lifted on December 21. While Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is now appealing the decision, they are not seeking to keep Title 42 in place.
Ending Title 42 is almost certain, according to experts and Biden officials, to invite a flood of illegal immigration that could set daily records at the border. Most recently, anonymous Biden officials said they worry an “open border” message will reach the world’s migrants and spur a massive surge.
The Biden administration’s existing plan will use American taxpayer money to fund additional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to more quickly release border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities away from the border.
Without Title 42, Biden officials have admitted that up to half a million border crossers and illegal aliens — the equivalent of the population of Atlanta, Georgia — could arrive at the border every month.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) told Breitbart News in April that he expects 30,000 border crossers and illegal aliens every day at the border without Title 42. In Tijuana, Mexico, alone, Breitbart News exclusively reported months ago that up to 6,000 foreign nationals were waiting to rush the border when Title 42 ends.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
CNN’s Jake Tapper Touts Amnesty, Hides Pocketbook Damage
A last-minute, back-of-an-envelope amnesty plan by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) could help migrants get amnesty and also tighten U.S. border security, CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed on Sunday.
But Tapper hid the economic pain that is inflicted on ordinary Americans by the government delivery of more migration into Americans’ workplaces and housing.
In a Sunday CNN interview with Sinema, Tapper sugar-coated the vague, undebated, draft bill by describing it as an effort to “provide extra security for the border and also provide a path to legal status for the [illegal migrants] dreamers.”
“Thom and I are working with a coalition of members in both parties in the Senate right now to build the support to try and pass this legislation,” Sinema replied. “To be honest, Jake, I don’t know if we can get it done or not by the end of this year — but we’re trying so hard,” she added.
Yet the business-boosted bill would allow hundreds of thousands more legal immigrants. It would fund the delivery of many new migrants via wider asylum doors through the border, and would allow at least two million “DACA” migrants to get citizenship for the illegal-migrant parents who brought them into the United States.
That border rush would also inflict huge economic harm on Americans, many of who are seeing their wage cuts and their rents raised, by President Joe Biden’s refusal to block millions of poor and hard-working migrants.
Tapper ignored the pocketbook impact of migration on Americans — but sympathetically urged Sinema to describe her own childhood poverty. She replied:
My family faced really tough times when I was a kid. So, I was born into a middle-class family, but my parents got divorced when I was little. And, I mean, that’s pretty common, right? There are lots and lots of families that go through that situation.But after my parents got divorced, things were tough. And so we ended up living in a — kind of an old gas station … we didn’t have running water or electricity. And that was a challenge. [ I was] about the age of 8, a little — until not quite 12 … My parents’ church helped us a lot during those times. Family and friends helped us during those times. And so I think that’s how I really developed this — what some people would say is an interesting mix — but I actually think is pretty normal, of both wanting to encourage folks to work really hard and do their best to get that shot at the American dream, and absolutely recognizing that, sometimes, we have to help people on their path to that American dream.
Tapper was eager to sympathize with the Senator, saying:
Essentially, you were homeless? … And how did that affect you both as a person and as a politician? … It was just an abandoned gas station, and you made it your home? … Did it have plumbing? Did it have electricity? … It just sounds like a very traumatic experience for a little kid. Did you have heat in the winter?
“It just sounds traumatic, it just sounds rough,” Tapper added.
Sinema replied:
Jake, there are a lot of families in our country today who are living in that kind of insecurity, lots of families.And so, actually, that’s one of the reasons I decided to enter public office, because I want to create an economy and a community that ensures there are fewer families living in situations like we struggled through, and that we create more opportunities for folks to get that shot at the American dream, and that we’re making sure that we’re creating an economy that works for everyone.
But Tapper’s sympathy for Sinema, and Sinema’s claim of wanting “an economy that works for everyone,” are undermined by the text of the amnesty-and-immigration bill.
Amnesty and migration cut wages, and push working Americans out of jobs and onto welfare. They drive up housing costs and reduce workplace productivity and family fertility. They fuel resentful tribalism and chaotic diversity that make it harder for ordinary Americans to manage their society.
The transfer of human resources from poor countries also boosts the wealth of investors, landowners, and executives, further expanding the gap in wealth and power between elites and ordinary people.
Migration advocates periodically admit migration helps to curb wages.
For example, the Des Moines Register reported on December 11 about the agricultural sector’s complaints about a claimed worker shortage and their push for a farmworker amnesty bill.
The draft “Farm Workforce Modernization Act” would allow employers to sideline American workers and technology investment, and instead, swap citizenship to foreign workers in exchange for several years working for cut-rate wages. The newspaper reported:
“Nearly everyone I talk with is significantly short of the number of employees they’d like to have,” said Bill Northey, CEO of the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, a group representing seed, fertilizer and other agriculture companies. “Often that number is 10-15% short of who they’d really like to have.[Because of the shortage] “Most have significantly increased their salaries,” said Northey, a former Iowa agriculture secretary and undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Trump administration. “That’s helped, but it doesn’t create people out of thin air. They need a bigger pool of folks to reach out to.”…Salary restrictions for farm workers under the House bill would save businesses nearly $2.8 billion through 2024, an amount that includes $37.4 million in Iowa, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank.
Rural areas in Iowa lost population: In 62 counties that are not part of metropolitan or micropolitan areas, the population dropped to 797,433 from 818,477, a 3% decrease, the [most recent 10-year] census showed. Altogether, 67 of Iowa’s 99 counties lost population.
Rising wages can draw people back into agricultural areas, said a 2020 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, saying that a study “found that rural counties with higher salaries and job growth were especially effective in attracting workers from urban areas.”
But migration advocates sneer at Americans’ learned and deep opposition to Congress’ amnesty bills.
“For many impeders, one word, “amnesty” — less a thought than an evasion of thinking — suffices to paralyze immigration policy,” establishment columnist George Will wrote in a December 11 op-ed. “Incessantly shrieked, this word sends legislators stampeding away from providing to America’s very approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants … something that is in the national interest: a path to citizenship.”
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
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