The Biden administration is reportedly allowing the release of illegal border crossers into the United States without scheduling a court date, which is an “unprecedented move,” according to Fox News.
“Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector (RGV) have begun to process and release illegal border crossers who claim asylum without issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA) – allowing them to depart custody without scheduling a court date for a hearing,” Fox News reported on Sunday. “The unprecedented move places the responsibility of seeking an asylum hearing on the migrants through Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or legal assistance.”
Fox News confirmed the news by speaking to multiple Border Patrol agents, which comes after the Biden administration put an unofficial so-called “gag order” on the U.S. Border Patrol to prevent them from sharing with the media what was happening inside Biden’s border crisis.
Border Patrol officials told Fox News that they have been directed to use “prosecutorial discretion (PD) to forgo the hours-long process of paperwork required to issue [a Notice to Appear] amid the surge of migrants at the border.” The illegal border crossers are instead entered into the system using biometric data and then allegedly released into the United States.
Border Patrol officials told Fox News that this was separate from the unaccompanied minors disaster that has unfolded under Biden. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that there are 15,000 unaccompanied children in the possession of the U.S. federal government, nearly double the highest number ever recorded by the Department of Homeland Security.
“When you create a system that incentivizes people to come across, and they are released, that immediately sends a message to Central America that if you come across you can stay,” Democrat Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (TX), whose district is on the border, told The Washington Post. “It incentivizes droves of people to come, and the only way to slow it down is by changing policy at our doorstep. If they don’t change the policy, the flow of continued migration traffic isn’t going to stop or slow down.”
The Post reported:
The warnings began before Biden even took office. During the transition period, career officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection tried to issue sober alarms to the Biden team about the likelihood of a crisis at the border that could quickly overwhelm the nation’s capacity. Senior CBP officials delivered Zoom briefings to the Biden transition team that included modeling projections showing a steep increase in the arrival of unaccompanied minors if Trump’s policies were suddenly lifted, according to one current and two former Department of Homeland Security officials. …
Biden transition officials understood the risks, as well, identifying a surge of unaccompanied minors and a dearth of shelter space exacerbated by the pandemic as the most pressing problems.
Yet Biden immediately embarked on an aggressive strategy to roll back Trump administration policies. On his first day, Biden suspended border wall construction, affirmed protections for young immigrant “dreamers,” scrapped Trump’s ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, and ordered a 100-day moratorium on deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also sent a broad immigration overhaul proposal to Congress, including an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status.
More moves followed in rapid-fire succession. The president ordered a major increase in refugee admissions. He launched a task force to reunify families separated by Trump’s “zero tolerance” crackdown while easing restrictions for minors under Title 42. And he ended the “Remain in Mexico” program Trump had used to send asylum seekers back across the border to wait outside U.S. territory for their cases to be decided — allowing hundreds of families crowded into squalid camps to enter the United States, producing emotional scenes that circulated widely in Spanish-language media.
Numerous Democrat lawmakers have panned Biden’s handling of his border crisis, saying that he is not doing enough to fix it and that it could be catastrophic for the Democrat Party and the country.