National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told the New York Post on Wednesday that the Biden administration is artificially reducing the number of migrant encounters at the southern border.
Judd explained that the administration is flying migrants into the United States “so that the border doesn’t look as out of control.” The union president called the plan “just a bait and switch.”
“They’re just paroling people in through airports rather than having them come across the border,” Judd told the Post. “They’re just gonna keep the numbers at around 5,000 [border crossings per day], parole people in and say, ‘Oh, look, we cut our numbers down.'”
The number of border encounters is “astronomical[ly] high” compared to the Donald Trump and Barack Obama administrations.
“We’re still five times higher than what we should be,” Judd continued, “but lower than those record number of apprehensions at the southern border.”
According to a Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information lawsuit, the Biden administration used Customs and Border Protection’s cellphone app, CBP One, to secretly fly in 320,000 “inadmissible” illegal migrants in 2023, Blaze News previously reported.
The nonprofit think tank’s senior national security fellow Todd Bensman reported that the White House transported the migrants, preapproved through CBP One, to 43 airports in the U.S. from January through December 2023. The migrants were citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador.
In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the CBP One application to encourage migrants to apply for entry while in their home country in a “safe and orderly” manner. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed the mobile app would discourage and ultimately reduce illegal immigration at the southern border.
A CBP spokesperson stated last year that less than 1% of migrants who have requested appointments at a port of entry through the app have been rejected.
The program was expanded again last summer to be able to allow up to 522,000 migrants per year into the country.
Troy A. Miller, the senior official performing the duties of the CBP commissioner, said the expansion would increase “the number of available appointments at ports of entry for the second time in less than two months, through scheduling enhancements and operational efficiencies.”
Since January 2023, roughly 413,300 migrants have “successfully scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry using CBP One,” CBP reported earlier this year.
Judd warned that, with all the new arrivals flooding the country, he expects an “amnesty program in the future.”
“All you’re doing is inviting more people to come because they then see, ‘OK, well, all I gotta do is get here, stay here for 10 years and I’m gonna have a legal pathway down the road as well,'” he told the Post. “It doesn’t work.”
“Does Joe Biden really understand how many illegal aliens he’s imported?” NBPC wrote on X. “If you think a man who can’t read a teleprompter or find his way off a stage can accurately count into the millions, you may need help.”
The White House did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
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