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WASHINGTON, D.C. Yesterday, the House Budget Committee held ahearingentitledThe Cost of the Border Crisisto highlightthe importance of border security and the fiscal implications of President Bidens failed border policies. Witnesses from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Texas Public Policy FoundationsSecure and Sovereign TexasInitiative, and Kinney County, Texas, testified before the committee to show the impacts of the border crisis, particularly the southern border, on a local, state, and federal level.

Some key moments from the hearing:

Chairman Arrington (R-TX):

ClickHEREto watch Chairman Arringtons opening remarks.

The greatest national security threat to the American people is posed by these open borders. The social cost has consistently been well in front of the American people. ButI don't think we've talked enough about the financial burden to taxpayers and the fiscal impact.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has done a great job. Studies suggest this cost is upwards of$400 billion,but their cost estimate is$150 billion. The lion's share of that cost is borne by state and local governments. State and local governments can't borrow or print money like the federal government, so they have to balance their budgets by either absorbing this cost through raising taxes or they have to cut services to their citizens.

Budget Process Reform Chair Rep. Rudy Yakym (R-IN):

ClickHERE to watch Rep. Yakyms remarks.

President Biden created this crisis on day one when he signed his first actions that have undermined border security and encouraged illegal immigration. Despite the unprecedented surge in illegal immigration,the Biden administration chose to deny that there was any problem at all. As a matter of fact, just 11 months in they called it quote cyclical or seasonal. They continue to insist that the border is secure at about the 28-month mark.

Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA):

ClickHEREto watch Rep. Smuckers remarks.

We are allowing the flow of drugs, we are allowing the flow of criminals into the country. Im from Lancaster County, 2000 miles from the border. We have hundreds of fentanyl deaths in our region.Its a real problem that we have in every single city, every single area of the country really has been affected by the Biden Administrations policy on the border.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA):

ClickHEREto watch Rep. McClintocks remarks.

Opposition to illegal immigration is not opposition to legal immigration. In fact, the people I find who are the angriest about illegal immigration are the legal immigrants who have played by the rules, waited patiently in line, and are now watching millions of illegal migrants cut in line in front of them. And if we're going to encourage and reward illegal immigration, which is a clear and consistent policy of the Democrats today, then there's no point in legal immigration.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX):

ClickHERE to watch Rep. Roys remarks.

This notion that people flowing across the border, I heard one of my colleagues on either side of the aisle talk about the benefits of parole, that somehow that was fixing the system. Is that not in fact, a backdoor way to dump more people into the United States rather than having them visibly come across the border, enraging the American people rightfully, and rather fly them into the United Statesto the tune of 400,000 people last year, including the State of Texas and the state of Florida, and fly them into the country under parole when the law requires a case by case analysis.

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI):

ClickHEREto watch Rep. McClains remarks.

The federal government spent over$66 billion on illegal immigrants in 2023. According to FAIR, does anyone here want to guess how much we've spent on homeless veterans in 2023? Anybody want to guess?$66 billion on illegals and $3 billion on people who have laid down their lives for this country.

Oversight Task Force Chair Rep. Jack Bergman (R-MI):

ClickHEREto watch Rep. Bergmans remarks.

The cartels are operating as brokers and playing all sides against the middleto create the environment that, because of their use of drones because of their use of different submersibles, because of all the things they use, that there are probably things that we don't see that are tied together for the benefit of those against us.

The Bottom Line:

The House Budget Committees hearing on the Cost of the Border Crisisrevealed the uncomfortable truth about the cost of President Bidens border crisis.

We continue toSound the Alarmon the cost of the border crisis. American taxpayers are paying at least$150.7 billion in order to cover the costs of President Bidens open border policies. This cost burden on the American taxpayer is in addition to the failed economic policies of this Administration. All Americans are paying the price for Bidens radical policies, and we exposed their true cost.

More From the House Budget Committee on the Border Crisis:

Readmoreabout Bidens Border BlunderHERE.

Readmoreabout Bidens Border Crisis HERE.

ReadChairman Arringtons Amicus Brief in support of S.B. 4 in U.S. v. TexasHERE.

WatchChairman Arringtons Fox News interview on the Cost of the Border CrisisHERE.

Originally posted here:
The Cost of the Border Crisis: $150.7 Billion and Counting | The U.S. House Committee on the Budget - House Budget Committee

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)introducedtheNo Taxpayer Funds for Illegal Immigrant Identity Cards Act,barringPresident Biden's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using taxpayers' dollars to issueidentity cards to illegal immigrants.

"Joe Biden opened the border and ushered in an era of unprecedented chaos in the U.S. And, now, rather than getting the crisis under control, he wants to use Americans money to fund ID cards for illegals,said Senator Hawley.Enough. Biden should be deporting illegal immigrants and securing our bordernot giving them IDs and making it easier for them to take advantage of taxpayer benefits."

Under a new DHS initiative set tolaunchthis summer, theICE Secure Docket Card Program is poised to provide thousands of illegal immigrants with Secure Docket Cards" featuring a photograph and biographical information. These identity cards risk enabling illegal immigrants to exploit certain privileges and government benefits, such ashousing, healthcare, or transportationall at American taxpayers' expensewhile incentivizing more illegal immigration into the country.

TheNo Taxpayer Funds for Illegal Immigrant Identity Cards Actwould:

Senator Hawley previouslyraisedconcerns over the Biden Administration's carelessness concerning illegal immigrants' use of identification forms ina 2022 letter to the Transportation Security Administration. He demanded answersabout illegal aliens using arrest warrants and notices of deportation as valid identification to pass checkpoints and board commercial airplanes.

See original here:
Hawley Introduces Bill to Prohibit Taxpayer Dollars from Funding New Biden Admin Illegal Immigrant ID Program - Josh Hawley

While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made apromise to votersif he were elected again: Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, he said. Trump, who made asimilar pledgeduring his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promiseat rallies across the country.

Trump was referring toOperation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Wetback was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.

Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, includingNational Guard troops, to remove the estimated11 million undocumented immigrantsnow living in the U.S.

As amigration scholar, I find Trumps proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhowers policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.

Operation Wetback

In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country fromareas along the southern border. Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Swing ramped up adecade-long practiceof using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vastwire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.

Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident,88 migrantsdied of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.

By mid-August, INS agents had deportedmore than 100,000 immigrantsacross the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands morereportedly fled back to Mexicoon their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removingnearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is alsoevidence of U.S. citizensgetting caught up in the INS sweeps.

Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that the day of the wetback is over. The INSdisbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrantsplummetedover the next decade.

Not just about deportation

Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation.

Thegovernments claimto have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The1.1 million figurewas for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions wererepeat arrests, sometimes in a single day. Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurredwithout a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended.

Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a wetback invasion across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetbacks main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but ratherto frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.

This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as theBracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over4.6 million short-term contractsto more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers.Nearly three-quarters of these contractswere issued between 1955 and 1964 after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.

Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up inOperation Wetback commented, I will come back legally, if possible. If not, Ill just walk across again.

The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigrationin a 1958 report, stating that should a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.

It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase inborder arrestsafter 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.

Real lessons

If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.

First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents producedfar fewer apprehensionsas they struggled to find and detain immigrants.

Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s.Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. Anestimated 42%entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received ashort-term legal statusthat protects them from immediate deportation.

Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions andMexican-American organizationsare now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, isunlikely to allowmassive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation.

Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.

Katrina Burgess does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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Trump promises to deport all undocumented immigrants, resurrecting a 1950s strategy but it didn't work then and is ... - Insight News

The Biden administration is touting a decrease in nationwide border encounters, but the numbers are still significantly higher than those under the Trump administration, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Officialsreported nearly a quarter of a million illegal immigrant encounters for April 2024, bringing the total number of encounters to more than 1.9 million this fiscal year. With five months left in fiscal year 2024, the current number of encounters is already significantly higher than any complete fiscal year under former President Donald Trump.

Mark Morgan, former Customs and Border Protection acting commissioner, told Just the News, that the Biden administration is "playing the shell game" with illegal immigration statistics.

"We have executed the largest surge of removals and disruptive activities against human smuggling networks in the past decade. As a result of this increased enforcement, southwest border encounters have not increased, bucking previous trends," acting Border Patrol Commissioner Troy Miller saidlast week.

Although the number of encounters last month 247,837 is fewer than the number reported in April 2023 or April 2022, Morgan said last month's numbers are "still catastrophic" and the comparison should be made to the number of encounters under Trump.

For example, from October 2022 through February 2023, Trump's final fiscal year before he instituted Title 42, an emergency health order preventing immigration due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were281,998 encounters nationwide. During that same time period this fiscal year, encounters rose by nearly 430% to more than 1.4 million.

The total number of migrant encounters for last month included people processed through the CBP One app and other parole systems, Morgan said.

Officials processed 41,000 people last month through the CBP One app, which allows people attempting to enter the U.S. to wait in Mexico until they have an appointment at a set time.

The people processed through CBP One and parole would still otherwise be inadmissible to the U.S., but they were processed in this manner "to avoid bad political optics, and to reverse and to reduce those that were illegally entering in between the ports of entry," Morgan said.

In another example of this, CBP stated that last month there were "128,900 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border," which is 6% lower than in March 2024 and 30% lower than in April 2023. However, this statistic omits how more people are going to actual ports of entry for processing.

Additionally, nearly 180,000 people came to the Southwest border alone last month, which is nearly 6,000 people a day. Notably, Obama administration Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson previously said that 1,000 apprehensions a day would overwhelm the migration system.

April's numbers do not include the number of "gotaways," orillegal immigrants who evaded Border Patrol. Last fiscal year alone, more than670,000 gotaways entered the U.S., more than any previous recorded year dating back to 2010. With an average of more than 55,000 gotaways a month last year, there are no signs it would slow down.

Illegal immigration is a hot topic ahead of the election this fall, and a February Gallup poll said that it was the "first time immigration has been the single most important problem [for voters] since 2019."

Follow Madeleine Hubbard onXorInstagram.

Original post:
Illegal immigration remains stubbornly high despite Biden's attempts to paint it as decreasing - Just The News

NEW YORK Following an investigation by ICEs Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and subsequent prosecution from the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of New York (EDNY), Yong Min Choe, 55, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conceal and harbor illegal aliens by employing them at his 7-Eleven franchise in Brentwood, New York. When sentenced, Choe faces up to 10 years imprisonment as well as a fine of up to twice the value of the gross gain. Additionally, Choe agreed to forfeit more than $1.3 million in assets that represent proceeds of the offense.

In March 2004, Choe began operating the 7-Eleven store in Long Island and agreed to abide by state and local labor laws. Between 2004 and November 2019, Choe hired individuals who did not have authorization to work in the United States and allowed those employees to use false social security numbers and other personal identifying information. As a result, Choe was able to pay his employees sub-standard wages and enrich himself.

Over the course of 15 years, Choe knowingly hired individuals who had no legal authorization to work in the U.S., then took advantage of their illegal status by paying them inadequate wages with long hours, stated Peter C. Fitzhugh, special agent in charge of HSI New York. HSI and its law enforcement partners are committed to protecting our communities from the abuses of corrupt business owners seeking to gain an illegal advantage and make a steep profit off the backs of others.

The defendant conveniently used his convenience store to harbor and exploit alien employees and steal wages, stated United States Attorney Richard P. Donoghue. This Office, together with our law enforcement partners, is committed to vigorously enforcing immigration and labor laws that protect our borders as well as the workplace.

Todays guilty plea illustrates our commitment to pursuing those who intentionally misuse Social Security numbers to circumvent immigration and employment law, stated SSA-OIG Special Agent-in-Charge John Grasso. I want to thank the other participating agencies for their efforts in investigating and prosecuting this case, and their partnership in our work to protect the integrity of the Social Security system.

HSIs Worksite Enforcement Unit oversees ICEs worksite enforcement strategy, which focuses on protecting Americas critical infrastructure. The strategys goal is to reduce the demand for illegal employment and protect employment for the nations lawful workforce. The unit accomplishes this through the prosecution of employers, Form I-9 inspections, fines and the ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers employee verification program. View the Worksite Enforcement page for more information. The governments case is being handled by the EDNYs Public Integrity Section.

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7-Eleven franchisee pleads guilty to harboring illegal aliens - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Newsroom