Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

RJ HAUMAN: Are Joe Biden And Alejandro Mayorkas Serious?

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The Biden administration is now resorting to using threats to try to accomplish its goals.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) communicated through leaks that it will release 4,000 to 6,000 illegal immigrants from detention unless Congress passes costly supplemental legislation requested by Joe Biden.

The administration claims that it must do this due to a “budget shortfall.” That is nonsense and nothing more than a misleading extortion attempt to prolong a self-inflicted invasion that has been compounded by the gutting of interior enforcement. Keep in mind this is an administration that sought to suspend all deportations for 100 days on Day One.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas seems determined to prove why House Republicans had good cause to impeach him.

He is threatening to harm American communities with the release of thousands of criminal aliens. Mayorkas and the White House are warning Congress and the American people that their lives will be put in danger if Congress doesn’t approve a supplemental that would codify the crisis under the guise of ending it.

This is extortion, plain and simple.

Congress actually gave the Biden administration more money than it requested for the detention of illegal aliens. The last spending bill, which has been continued at the same level, rejected a request to slash Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention capacity by 30%, instead providing $379.6 million above it to maintain 34,000 beds.

So, what is ICE spending money on that created this voluntary budget gap? Could it be that DHS is spending too much money on social programs for illegal immigrants and transporting them across the country? Also, why aren’t they shuffling around money to create more detention space, an action the Trump Administration took in response to a crisis that pales in comparison to what we’re currently facing.

The supplemental legislation that the administration is demanding would not just put money in ICE’s coffers to detain illegal immigrants — funding that cannot be trusted due to the lack of language requiring beds to be filled or the effective electronic monitoring program to be used. It contains countless policy changes that would convert the Biden administration’s destructive policies and violations of immigration law into statute.

These reforms would not only continue the border crisis on an industrial scale but make it more difficult for a future enforcement-minded president to fix.

The bill does the following: Accepts and codifies crisis levels of daily illegal immigration; continues catch and release and weakens current law by narrowing the mandatory detention statute; codifies and expands mass parole abuse; and continues to encourage asylum fraud and accelerate work permits.

Furthermore, the bill also provides numerous significant immigration reforms that are unrelated to border security, including more family and employment green cards for no apparent reason, as well as allowing approximately 250,000 adult children of guest workers who replaced American workers to stay and work in the U.S.

Even though the Senate bill includes $7.6 billion for ICE, an agency being quietly abolished from within, again, the amounts provided are unlikely to be properly used.

The Biden administration has been given billions of dollars in annual appropriations for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), yet the agency is not arresting, detaining, and removing illegal aliens in accordance with the law. Recent data revealed that Biden is deporting just one illegal immigrant for every 70 who arrive at the border, and the non-detained docket of illegal immigrants has swelled to roughly 6.2 million.

It is more likely that this money would be used to fund the processing and transportation of illegal aliens, not only putting us in the same situation we’re in but making it worse.

To be clear, if the administration follows through on its plan to release illegal immigrants from ICE detention, Biden will be putting American lives at risk. Releasing known criminals into American neighborhoods would be a dereliction of duty.

Let’s hope this is just a bluff from Alejandro Mayorkas and Joe Biden.

RJ Hauman is president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE).

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.