A Biden administration program meant to deport families who immigrated illegally to the United States has removed just over 10% of the immigrants signed up since May of last year.
The Family Expedited Removal Program has resulted in the deportation of only about 2,600 aliens from around 24,000 enrolled. More than 3,600 immigrants in the program are believed to be at large in the United States, though officials have lost track of them, according to internal data about the program reported by the New York Post.
“These numbers are further proof that the Biden-Harris administration’s policies have nothing to do with actually securing the border or enforcing the law, but instead masking its utter refusal to do either of those things,” Republican Rep. Mark Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the Post.
“Such a dismal rate of removals makes clear that President Biden, ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris, and now-impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are committed to ignoring U.S. immigration law, while attempting to hide that fact from the American people. Ultimately, these individuals have a simple responsibility — detain and remove those who have no lawful basis to remain,” he said.
The Biden administration announced the family removal program in May 2023 as a way of streamlining the deportation process of aliens who immigrated illegally into the U.S. with children. The program was designed to facilitate keeping families together during the deportation process.
The program’s effectiveness was undercut by significant exceptions, however, according to the Post. The program was also a target of progressives, such as Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington. Groups such as the National Immigrant Justice Center resisted the program as well.
The Biden administration’s efforts at combating illegal immigration have tended toward expanding legal immigration pathways, such as through immigration parole, rather than through enhanced border protection and deportation.
The administration paused one major parole program earlier this month after allegations of fraud. The Department of Homeland Security froze a program that has allowed 30,000 immigrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) to be paroled into the U.S. The action came after the Federation for American Immigration Reform published a report calling the program “riddled with fraud.”
Green said in a statement that the report “vindicates every warning we have ever issued about the unlawful CHNV mass-parole program.”
“This is exactly what happens when you create an unlawful mass-parole program in order to spare your administration the political embarrassment and bad optics of overrun borders. The Biden-Harris administration should terminate the CHNV program immediately,” Green said.