The cartel human smuggling business is booming under President Joe Biden’s watch. Don’t take my word for it; listen to his Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy, Blas Nunez-Neto.
On Tuesday, Breitbart reported that Nunez-Neto recently said, “We see migrants now routinely paying smuggling organizations vast sums of money — often more than $10,000 to $15,000 — to facilitate their journey to the border.”
Nunez-Neto added that those payments are now often winding up in the hands of the cartels.
“This is so lucrative, in fact, that we are now seeing the drug cartels increasingly becoming a key player in not just collecting taxes for people who transit through their territory — which is what we saw historically — but actually moving people and becoming deeply involved in human smuggling, not just in Mexico, but throughout the region,” he said.
The senior official’s comments came during an interview with the Migration Policy Insitute.
Nunez-Neto went on to state that the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy, as well as its asylum rules, make the smuggling more profitable. Cartels and other actors can practically guarantee that not only will their so-called clients be allowed to cross into the U.S., but they’ll soon be able to work in America as well.
Not only is the Biden administration attracting more illegal aliens, but the immigration court backlog is creating a compounding problem, he explained.
“I think we are seeing the court system essentially become a proxy legal pathway for people to come into the United States and work while they’re here … and it’s leading to these huge backlogs that we are seeing in the courts as well,” the official said.
Thus far, Biden’s solutions to this problem have included a new “parole” system that allows migrants who would have otherwise been likely to cross the border illegally to enter the country. Under the new system, individuals seeking to enter the country fill out a smartphone app that serves as their asylum paperwork, without the need for a visa.
The Biden administration will accept more than half a million asylum seekers per year, a recent report said. During the last two years, the administration has already allowed at least 541,000 migrants into the country through the parole authority, Daily Wire reporter Mairead Elordi reported last week.
To that extent, Nunez-Neto also said, “I think in general, our approach has been that we would like to see individuals using safe and orderly pathways and processes to come into the country. … We think there’s a significant public benefit associated with channeling people into these lawful processes…”
Yet, as this author has previously observed, the problem is that the Left’s definition of “order” simply means that illegal aliens are “processed” by immigration officials and then released into the country via new “legal” measures — such as the smartphone app.
“Order” to the Democrats does not mean having the necessary physical barriers or manpower necessary at the U.S.-Mexico border to deter entry. Nor does it include enforcing policies that effectively prevent illegal immigrants from entering the nation in the first place.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.