Center for Immigration Studies by Todd Bensman on November 21, 2022
CIS gets rare access to a secretive, expanding program that makes border crossing "legal"MEXICALI, Mexico – This northern Mexican city across from California is one of the latest to go live with an unreported, legally questionable new immigration strategy that President Joe Biden’s administration has discretely unfurled for months all along the U.S. southern border.
Twice a day, seven days a week since September, Mexicali city officials working closely with Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection, on a secure shared “CBP-ONE” online platform, select hundreds of people a month for their escorted government-to-government handoffs through the land port of entry to Calexico, Calif. Once the Americans check their paperwork, they legally admit intending illegal border crossers like Nicaraguan Maria Esperanza Diaz Ruiz, 42, into the U.S. interior under a questionable authority known as “humanitarian or significant public benefit parole.”
They are free to start new lives under the benefit, with work authorization and the right to apply for asylum part of the package.
As she waited with 25 other selected immigrants for her legal ride to America, Maria told the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) she’d left home figuring she would have to pay smugglers to cross her over the border illegally. But up-trail word from friends reached her down-trail by cell phone that the Biden administration had legally admitted them and many others from Mexicali under the new humanitarian parole program.
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The new face of Biden’s border crisisIndeed, thousands are hearing about this new legal way in – and swamping an expanding system of Mexican shelters that gradually feed their occupants through American ports of entry with temporary legal status and opportunity to make the big move permanent. Local authorities are working to expand shelter facilities and establish new ones to accommodate the soaring demand for the legalized crossings, two shelter managers in Mexicali and one in Tijuana told CIS.
Mexicali city officials recently granted CIS rare, unfettered access to their side of the legalized border-crossing operation that began in September with President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. Construction on a significant building expansion was underway on acreage behind it.
The Mexicali operation mirrors others just like it that began funneling increasing numbers of immigrants claiming tales of woe into the United States through ports of entry from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico, the three shelter managers say. Mexico also appears to have set up operations well south of the American border, in Cancun on Mexico’s southern Caribbean coast and in Monterrey farther north, where pre-approved immigrants are flown into American airports.
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Expanding out of public sight and mindSome scattered media have tangentially reported the Biden administration's recent application of the escort parole program to Venezuelans and Ukrainians. In August, the news outlet Border Report disclosed that foreign nationals who claimed to be gay found that they could also get the escort from Tijuana to San Diego on humanitarian parole.
But not seen anywhere in the popular media was that DHS was expanding the program all along the rest of the border and also deep inside Mexico, providing a work-around to court-ordered push backs but also an open avenue for people only interested taking advantage of it.
For instance, CBP is taking handoffs of regular Mexican citizens and giving them humanitarian parole. Providing such benefit to Mexicans is extremely unusual.
In fact, the majority of the 25 people CIS saw driven to a legal crossing on November 4 were Mexican citizens from the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, and Oaxaca. These men and women staked their applications to a recent spate of cartel violence in Baja and Sonora. But American asylum judges have always uniformly rejected Mexican citizen claims of cartel violence for asylum on grounds that they can find safe haven elsewhere inside Mexico, and Border Patrol routinely pushes back single Mexican men into Mexico under Title 42.
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Using a questionable legal authority with increasing gustoOne other reason why the Biden administration does not seem eager to publicize what it is doing at the ports: Some experts question the legality of its use of humanitarian parole.
“Humanitarian parole was never intended to be used this way, and Congress made it clear that parole is not meant to be a supplement to immigration policy,” said Elizabeth Jacobs, a CIS fellow and former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official, when informed that the escort hand-off program was being used much more broadly than reported. Jacobs said humanitarian parole can only be used on a case-by-case basis for no other purpose than urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.
“If these accounts are true, the United States government is acting directly in conflict with the limits and procedures established under federal law,” Jacobs said. “Escorting inadmissible aliens into the United States for the sole purpose of granting these aliens work authorization is a blatant abdication of DHS’s responsibility to uphold federal immigration law.”
Stealthily, perhaps with that in mind, DHS launched one early version of the handoff program in late 2021 in Reynosa, Mexico, where CIS discovered that Mexico was escorting hundreds of giddy immigrants every week for delivery to the Americans through a McAllen port of entry into Texas.
Nowadays, though, the program delivers immigrants, at the least, from Tijuana to San Diego, Agua Prieta to Douglas in Ariz., Juarez to El Paso, Nuevo Laredo to Laredo, Reynosa to McAllen, and Matamoros to Brownsville, the shelter managers say. It’s going on in interior Mexico too, they say.
How many have gotten through in this questionable manner is hard to find.
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An American recipe for Mexican fraud and corruptionThe system generally works pretty much like Mexicali’s everywhere else: After immigrants arrive in one of seven Mexicali shelters that feed into the final government one that Gomez runs, a battalion of non-profit migrant advocate volunteers help them collect required paperwork. The volunteers and the UN International Organization for Migration see to it that food, shelter, and clothing needs are provided while the immigrants hit the American requirements that they deserve humanitarian parole.
But fraud and corruption are strongly indicated. For example, the U.S. wants “proof” of psychological trauma for humanitarian parole, so the human rights non-profits provide psychologists to conduct assessments and provide written recommendations for the parole.
If applicants claim they’re fleeing danger, university law professors and students help them file police reports over the phone to home countries after the fact, then get the police reports sent back as “evidence,” three shelter managers confirmed. If immigrants want in on a claim of urgent medical need, the non-profits provide the doctors to attest to their desperate straits.
But two of the shelter managers said the system is easily and frequently gamed with the assistance of these volunteers who are not concerned about truthfulness. He said he believes many of the applicants say whatever they’re told will get them over the line.
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The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.
More:
https://cis.org/Bensman/Legalizing-Border-Crossing-All-Next-Stage-Bidens-Migration-Crisis
