Illegal immigrants flooding across the border are being dispersed throughout the U.S., often by government officials — but even Congress doesn’t know where they’re ending up, according to a Thursday letter from Republican lawmakers.
A letter sent to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and signed by thirty-three Republican congressman, requested:
• The name and location of each U.S. city and town where illegal immigrants have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding including their own or private funding for all individuals who entered the U.S. without visas; and…
• For each named U.S. city or town, the total number of immigrants who have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding including their own or private funding to such city or town.
The measures being taken on the border are so drastic that federal employees at entirely unrelated agencies were asked to take four months of paid leave to relocate to the southern border to help find destinations for unaccompanied minors.
Meanwhile, elected officials have been kept in the dark to such an extent that Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) said a Biden aide asked him to delete photos he had taken at an overcrowded facility along the border.
The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports low immigration whose writer was reporting from Del Rio, Texas, said in March that buses departing from Texas “often drop their Haitian, Venezuelan, and Cuban passengers in Florida and New Jersey. Those from Nicaragua and other Central American nations have been delivered to Tennessee, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and to large cities in Texas such as Dallas and Houston.”
The report was called “Catch and Bus.”
If the Joe Biden administration had its way, destinations would include well into the American heartland. Earlier this month, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said that she refused a request from the federal government to transport migrant children to the state, calling it “the president’s problem.”
Others have been held in cramped facilities for processing.
The congressional letter said “more than 171,000 people were taken into custody by Customs and Border Patrol” (CBP) in March alone, calling it a “manmade humanitarian and national crisis that is being facilitated on our southern border.”
“We are quite simply not prepared to handle such an extreme increase in illegal entries into our nation … many of these illegal aliens end up dispersed in cities across our nation. However, we lack an adequate accounting of the nature and extent of this dispersing of illegal aliens. This is information that the U.S. Congress needs and the American people have a right to know,” it added.
Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R), one of the letter’s writers, said in a statement: “Many illegal immigrants are receiving all-expenses-paid trips, oftentimes courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, to American cities across the country. Congress, and more importantly, the American people, have a right to know how many of these individuals will be flooding their neighborhoods.”