Report: DHS Is Allowing Injured Migrants to Stay

Guatemalan migrant Douglas Marroquin stands near an improvised kitchen covered at a migran
Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

President Joe Biden’s deputies are welcoming illegal migrants who are injured while trying to evade border barriers.

The Los Angeles Times reported February 26:

On a Feb. 18 call with advocates and lawyers, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas grew frustrated when asked about other cases in which border authorities expelled injured migrants under Title 42 [anti-epidemic rules] despite some being unable to walk after falling off the wall, according to [Linda] Corchado, who was on the call.

“He was just appalled that people are jumping the wall,” Corchado said. “The point is with Title 42, that’s what happens … people are getting more and more desperate.”

Corchado is the Texas-based director of legal services at Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center. She is also representing other migrants who were rescued from a snowstorm as they tried to sneak into American’s homeland.

“So they’re trying to climb up the wall on the Mexican side, and they’re falling down and getting injured — and so we’re supposed to collect them all and bring them here for medical treatment?” asked Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA, “the nation’s largest grassroots immigration-reduction organization.” She told Breitbart News:

Everything this administration has done so far on immigration is encouraging people to come north. Now, if they say, “Well, you can try to climb the wall and fall down and we’ll bring you in,” then we’ll see more of that,  If they say, “Risk dehydration in the desert,  and we’ll bring you in,” then we’ll see more of that. If they say “Risk frostbite coming in and we’ll bring you in and take care of you,” we’ ‘ll see more of that.

It is absolutely cruelty, not only to the migrants themselves, it’s cruel to the American workers who are going to have to compete for jobs, and the American taxpayers who are going to have to foot the bill for all of it.

“This is globalism on steroids — they’re actively trying to erase America,” Jenks said.

Corchado has other border-crossing clients, including:

an Indigenous couple from Guatemala who were caught in the winter weather … having nearly died from hypothermia. Their home was destroyed in recent hurricanes that slammed the Northern Triangle. In the hospital, the husband kept describing over and over how his wife told him she couldn’t feel her heartbeat anymore, instructing him on how she wanted their kids to be raised, Corchado said. Both tested positive for COVID-19.

At first, [Customs and Borde Protection] CBP officials indicated to the couple that they could be expelled under Title 42 once discharged. But late Wednesday, without notice to Corchado, the hospital released them, and Border Patrol detained them. A CBP supervisor said Thursday that they wouldn’t be expelled and their asylum claims would be considered, according to communications shared with The Times.

On March 1, the Los Angeles Times also reported that an injured migrant would be released into California after both of his hands were severely damaged by frostbite while he was sneaking across the border.

On February 28, former President Donald Trump slammed Biden’s policies are cruel. “What the Biden administration is doing to push young migrants into the hands of human traffickers and coyotes is dangerous, immoral, and indefensible,” he said in a speech at the CPAC conference, adding:

Perhaps worst of all, Joe Biden’s decision to cancel border security has single-handedly launched a youth migrant crisis that is enriching child smugglers, vicious criminal cartels, and some of the most evil people on the planet. You see it every day, just turn on the news. You’ll see it every day.

Under my administration, we stopped the child smugglers, we dismantle the criminal cartels, we greatly limited drug and human trafficking to a level that nobody actually thought was possible … But the Biden administration has put the vile coyotes back in business, and it has done so in a very, very big way.

Mayorkas and other officials are aware of the dangers migrants undergo as they try to accept President Joe Biden’s offer of asylum, jobs, and residency.

“We’ve also begun to rebuild a process for young people to be able to access avenues of protection without having to take the perilous journey,” Mayorkas told reporters March during a White House press conference. “We have begun to develop and rebuild of [an Obama] program to reunify individuals with families here in the United States, as was once the case. ”

However, Mayorkas shrugged off a question asking about migrants headed north expecting to push their way through Biden’s decreased border protections. Officials, he said, are telling migrants to wait until Biden’s deputies rebuild the migration process system, adding:

We are flooding the [media] space with that critical message. I cannot overstate its criticality for the wellbeing of those very individuals who are thinking of coming. Not to mention the wellbeing and stability of the border as we seek to rebuild it from its dismantled state … It’s very difficult to know those whom we have successfully deterred, but our understanding is that it does work, to a degree, certainly with certain aspects of the population.

“We need individuals to wait, and I will say that they will wait with a goal in mind, and that is our ability to rebuild as quickly as possible a system so that they don’t have to take the dangerous journey, and we can enable them to access humanitarian relief from their countries of origin,” he said.

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