President Biden announced Wednesday his appointment of Vice President Kamala Harris to handle the immigration crisis while a Democratic congressman warned that border agents have released some 2,000 illegal aliens in the United States without even telling them they are breaking the law and must appear in court.
The Washington Examiner reported the Border Patrol agents effectively are relying on the migrants to hold themselves accountable for illegally entering the country.
Reacting Thusday to the appointment of Harris, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused Biden of abdicating responsibility
“My reaction to that appointment is, is, wow, Joe Biden really doesn’t like Kamala Harris,” he said in an interview on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
“This border crisis is the biggest political mess Joe Biden has. It threatens to derail the entire administration. So what does he do? He looks to his vice president and says, you take it. It’s your problem now.”
Cruz said Harris “is not going to be able to solve this crisis,” arguing the administration has “created this crisis because of their political partisan commitments that they can’t back away from.”
During the Democratic presidential primaries, Biden invited migrants to “surge the border” and agreed to health care for illegal aliens, among other promises. On his first day in office, he began reversing policies by President Trump that addressed the 2019 border crisis.
“So why are we having this crisis at the border?” Cruz said, “Because when Joe Biden got elected, the first thing he did was stop construction of the border wall. He reinstituted ‘Catch and Release,’ the failed policy, so that now when we detain illegal immigrants, we let them go. We give them a court date sometime in the future, and many of them never show up, and he ended the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which was this incredibly successful foreign policy accomplishment where the Trump administration had negotiated with Mexico that illegal immigrants from Central America would remain in Mexico while their asylum proceedings were moving forward. All of those had produced real success.”
Cruz noted Democrats “campaigned on saying ICE is evil” and insisted “securing the border is wrong.”
“Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything to do other than go down there and let everybody go. I mean, that’s the only option that is consistent with the political promises she’s made,” he said.
The Examiner noted Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas has been critical of Biden’s immigration policies.
“I thought it was 150 people that they have released without a Notice to Appear, but it actually is getting now closer to 2,000 people they released,” Cuellar said. I “told the person, ‘Repeat it one more time.’ Two thousand. I thought it was bad when it was 150, but it’s now closer to 2,000 people.”
The report noted it’s “unprecedented for Border Patrol to catch and release illegal immigrants into the U.S. without a mechanism to ensure they enter legal proceedings.”
“Historically, when border authorities become overwhelmed, taking more people into custody than they can hold in facilities, those buildings become overcrowded, and families may be released into the country with documents that tell them when and where to appear in court for illegally crossing the border, which is a misdemeanor the first time and a felony anytime thereafter.”
Cuellar said the change means the U.S. government now is “depending on migrant families to act on their own recognizance to go through the legal process to see fi they should not be removed.”
Biden also accused the Trump administration of allowing the surge in migrants to begin.
However, many illegal aliens who have been interviewed about their travel to the U.S. southern border have said they are coming because they believe Biden invited them.
Some have crossed the border wearing “Biden” T-shirts.
Customs and Border Protection said officers encountered more than 100,000 migrants at the border in February and 78,000 in January.
CBP data shows there were 547,816 apprehensions at the southern border in all of 2020. That compares to 178,883 apprehensions since Jan. 1, 2021.
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