Catch and Release Assembly Line has Consequences

The Biden Administration’s latest strategy for dealing with the border catastrophe involves a neat accounting trick: Border apprehensions are made to appear lower by simply paroling many aliens through ports of entry. Because the aliens are not encountered attempting to enter illegally on the border, between ports of entry, they are not counted in the border apprehension numbers. So, like magic, the border apprehensions are going down, but the number of aliens without status entering the country chugs along as the Biden Administration continues to expand its so-called “legal pathways.”

The media, of course, is covering this credulously, pointing to lower border apprehension numbers as if Biden has solved the problem. President Obama did something similar when he started counting quick returns at the border as deportations to make it appear he was tough on border security. But no accounting trick can disguise how the catch-and-release assembly line—including mass parole and enforcement priorities that exempt most illegal aliens from removal—also means poorly vetted criminal aliens are being released into the United States.

Ransford Perry was convicted of endangering the welfare of a child in 2007. Then he was charged, a decade later, with forcible touching and endangerment of a child. Despite losing the final appeal of his deportation order, Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released him. Now, again, Perry has been arrested and charged with two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault, and another child endangerment charge related to a 13-year-old girl.

The President has in place an ICE enforcement priorities memo that essentially repeals immigration law by making most aliens exempt from removal as a matter of policy. Mr. Perry’s rape and assault of a 13-year-old girl happened specifically because of these catch-and-release policies.

Illegal alien Camilo Hurtado Campos was arrested in Tennessee for allegedly raping boys he drugged, some as young as nine. A CNN article on this horrific crime does not even mention his immigration status. Campos could have a decade of traumatized victims at his feet because our government has spent most of its time pushing for amnesty for the illegal alien population rather than enforcing the laws on the books that demand their removal.

Gerson Fuentes, another illegal alien, raped and impregnated a nine-year-old girl in Ohio. These are stories of stolen innocence behind the open borders policies of our government.

Then there is the illegal alien encountered at the border in April 2022 who was on the FBI’s Terror Watch list. The DHS Inspector General found “multiple mistakes” that led to the release of an apprehended terror watch list alien.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11, which followed multiple mistakes by a disjointed immigration system. The idea was that DHS would consolidate immigration security in one agency and avoid mistakes that led to the deaths of thousands of Americans. Well, they did not anticipate a President willfully abdicating his security responsibility and, instead, turning DHS into a border concierge.

Border Patrol apprehended this terror suspect and released him two days later, even though aliens encountered at the border without status are supposed to be detained. They released him after the FBI screened and failed to flag him. The Inspector General blamed Border Patrol for ineffective processes at the border. No doubt this is true, but it misses the specific point that Biden’s DHS is not focused on security as the main priority. They are attempting to release aliens at ludicrous speed and that goal is not compatible with screening and vetting, which takes time and will inevitably lead to forcing DHS to do its actual job under the law.

The stakes are clearly very high. In FY22, there were 98 encounters with aliens on the terror watch list. These arrests are climbing as the 98 encountered was a record, following 15 such arrests in FY21, and just three in FY20. FY23 looks to break that record again, as the number had already hit 125 by May. It is time to remember why DHS was created. The 9/11 hijackers all used the United States immigration system, which was focused more on approvals than security vetting. According to the 9/11 Commission’s report:

“Three hijackers were known or knowable by intelligence authorities as al Qaeda terrorists in early 2000, but their biographical information was not fully developed and communicated to border authorities for watchlisting at U.S. consulates abroad (by the State Department) and at the border (by immigration and customs border inspectors). The travel plans of all three also were known or knowable in 2000, in part because of cooperation from Arab and Asian country intelligence services and border authorities.”

Sound familiar? We are repeating the same mistakes today. More from the report:

“Thirteen of the hijackers presented passports less than three weeks old when they applied for their visas, but the new passports caused no heightened scrutiny of their visa applications. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications in detectable ways, but were not further questioned about those lies. Two hijackers were interviewed for reasons unrelated to terrorism. Most simply had their applications approved and their passports stamped with a U.S. visa. Consular officers were not trained to detect terrorists in a visa interview. Terrorism concerns were handled through the watchlist, and all the conspirators’ names were checked against the terrorist watchlist without producing a match.”

This sounds like a tautology, but if you create an assembly line of approvals with little to no concern for vetting, then you will get mass approvals of aliens who are not vetted. It is abundantly clear that DHS is repeating the same mistakes from the pre-9/11 era that the Department was created to stop. Unless you believe we are living in a less dangerous world today than in the 90’s, this is a significant threat.

The old adage is that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. That isn’t completely true, of course. You are just as likely to repeat history if you know it and ignore it. Or in this case, perhaps, President Biden assumes we are now immune from the threats of the old days. Whatever the case, he is playing with fire. His permissive policies are playing politics to desperately shield his failed immigration policies from uncomfortable headlines. He is fooling no one, least of all any terrorists looking to do this country enormous harm. The real question is simple: Does anyone have confidence that the current DHS could stop a terrorist seeking to do us harm from entering right now?

Your mileage may vary on an answer to these questions about the connection between terrorism and assorted criminal depravity to open borders and lax immigration enforcement. Open borders defenders repeatedly point to aggregate statistics (decisively debunked by the Center for Immigration Studies) suggesting that overall the immigrant population is less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. Of course, that is cold comfort for the families of 9/11 victims who were killed because the immigration system rolled out the red carpet with minimal vetting to the hijackers who slammed planes into buildings. Try explaining to the parents and raped children that really, when you think about it, they are a statistical anomaly if you take the long view. We cannot treat public safety as collateral damage for the open borders per-capita GDP expansion push. Each crime committed by someone without status to be here is preventable if the Federal government would enforce immigration law. How many more tragedies must we see before our leaders get serious?

JARED CULVER is a Legal Analyst for NumbersUSA