#Biden on where illegal immigrants in the US are going

The New York Post confirmed this week what close observers of the border have known ever since Joe Biden’s border policies triggered the ongoing migrant crisis: The Biden administration is quietly ushering in near-record numbers of illegal immigrants, even as it claims to be enforcing the border.

The Post reported on a series of recent charter flights originating in Texas that since Aug. 8 have carried thousands of migrants to a small airport outside White Plains. Many of these flights arrived in the dead of night and were met by buses and police escorts at the suburban airport before carrying migrants to locations across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, including group homes for migrants run by nonprofits that contract with the federal government.

Asked about the seemingly clandestine flights, the White House and the US Department of Health and Human Services insisted that nothing was amiss, this is all just part of the standard process of caring for unaccompanied children in federal custody before they can be reunited with a family member or a sponsor in the US.

In a sense, that’s correct: Transporting migrant youth all over the country to house them with nonprofits or reunite them with family members has indeed become standard practice under President Biden. That’s partly because there’s so many of them to house, and facilities on the border are overwhelmed.

Consider that so far this fiscal year, more than 132,000 underage migrants have been taken into federal custody — a 64 percent increase from the last border crisis in 2019, and a nearly 300 percent increase from last year.

These youth are part of a months-long, 21-year-record surge in illegal immigration, still ongoing, that was triggered when Biden scrapped many of former President Donald Trump’s border policies. So along with record numbers of migrant youth, we also have record numbers of families and single adults being released from federal custody.

What happens when these families and adults are released is unclear. Because federal immigration authorities have been overwhelmed with the sheer volume of people crossing the border, many migrants are released with nothing more than what’s called a notice to report (NTR), which isn’t the same as a notice to appear (NTA) before an immigration judge.

These NTRs are essentially a request by the federal government that within 60 days of their release, these migrants will on their own initiative check in with a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office wherever they end up in the US.

Fox News reported last week that nearly 95,000 migrants have been released with NTRs since March. Since Aug. 6, more than 32,000 others have been released “by parole,” a previously obscure policy that according to federal law is to be used only on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian purposes” and “significant public benefit.” A Customs and Border Protection official told Fox News that between 2014 and 2020, more than 80 percent of those released did not report in for their immigration proceedings as required.

This is how the Biden administration was able to clear out the massive encampment of Haitians in Del Rio, Texas, last month. In a matter of days, some 15,000 people had been cleared out from under a bridge near the border. A couple thousand were deported back to Haiti, an estimated 8,000 crossed back into Mexico for fear of deportation, and the rest were taken into federal custody — with most of them eventually released.

It’s an open door, and an invitation for hundreds of thousands more.

John Daniel Davidson is the ­political editor of The Federalist.