DHS Deputy: Biden’s Border Policy Expands Cartels’ Wealth and Reach

A top official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has admitted the federal government’s catch-and-release policies are helping the cartels grow rich by ushering more of their migrant clients into American jobs.

The admissions came from Blas Nunez-Neto, who is Alejandro Mayorkas’ deputy for border and immigration policy at DHS:

We see migrants now routinely paying smuggling organizations vast sums of money — often more than $10,000 to $15,000 — to facilitate their journey to the border. This is so lucrative [for the cartels], in fact, that we are now seeing the drug cartels increasingly becoming a key player in not just collecting taxes for people who transit through their territory [in Northern Mexico] — which is what we saw historically — but actually moving people and becoming deeply involved in human smuggling, not just in Mexico, but throughout the region, including, you know, in [South America’s] Colombia and Darien [Gap] region.

The cartels’ expanding business is built on their ability to deliver U.S. jobs to the clients, Nunez-Neto admitted:

Why would someone pay that much money to come to the border? And I think the simple answer is that …  once they’re in the immigration court system and they have filed the requisite [asylum] paperwork, they are eligible for Employment Authorization — which is obviously something that we support — but that means that they have years to live in the U.S. and go through the [asylum] process and earn money and support their family members back home during that process … I think we are seeing the [asylum] court system essentially become a proxy legal pathway for people to come into the United States and work while they’re here.

The DHS’s creation of a huge backlog of asylum claims also incentivizes further migration, Nunez-Neto acknowledged. “It is clear that the length of time is now taking to get through the immigration court process has become a significant pull factor [emphasis added] that is driving migration throughout the region,” he said, adding:

I think we are seeing the court system, essentially become a proxy legal pathway for people to come into the United States and work while they’re here … and it’s leading to these huge backlogs that we are seeing in the courts as well.

His comments echo a critical June 30 report by the acting ombudsman at the DHS agency responsible for processing migration claims, which said that the agency’s “growing humanitarian workload” has ensured:

processing times [for asylum claims by arrriving migrants] are likely now approaching a decade as backlogs in that humanitarian program now stand at 842,000 and are projected to reach historical records of over 1 million by the end of calendar year 2024.

The delays are a win for the migrants who know their asylum claims are bogus, Nunez-Neto noted:

All of these factors together, I think, are just drawing people to come because even if someone is ordered removed after four to six years, that is still a substantial amount of time for people to be able to be in the United States and working.

The backlog has grown because Mayorkas and his deputies have ignored Congress’ law which requires migrants to be detained until their asylum claims are decided. Instead, they portray migration as a humanitarian issue and a logistics problem that is best answered by registering the migrants and releasing them into the U.S. labor market.

FLASHBACK: Return of “Catch and Release” Driving Migrant Surge to U.S., Says Texas Border City Mayor

That catch-and-release process reassures potential migrants that they will be released to get the jobs they need to repay high-interest smuggling debts to the murderous cartels.

“Our immigration policy is objectively allied with the cartels and has been for a long time,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, adding that President Joe Biden’s deputies’ unwillingness:

to enforce the law makes them objective allies of the smuggling gangs … Obviously, these people are not monsters. They don’t enjoy people being locked up in stash houses and the rest of it, but they cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that they’re soft-headed view of migration is objectively false. It just doesn’t work.

Millions of rational migrants pay the cartels because they want U.S. jobs, no matter how much Biden’s deputies portray the migration as a humanitarian crisis, he added:

People aren’t going to undertake enormous expenses and risks unless there’s a decent chance of a payoff. You can say, for instance, that playing a lottery is irrational… But if the lottery had a 70 percent chance of payoffs, you bet you’d put thousands of dollars into it, especially if you didn’t have a lot of other opportunities. Migrants are playing a lottery — but they’re playing a lottery that has a very high likelihood of payoff.

Argentinian-born Nuñez-Neto made the admissions during a July 20 online conversation hosted by the pro-migration Migration Policy Institute.

The Cartel/Asylum Problem

Nunez-Neto said the administration is trying to fix the cartel problem by dramatically expanding the migrant-processing asylum systems to keep pace with the dramatic increase since 2021. “We’re just simply not resourced to keep pace with the changing demographics and just the increase in numbers that we’ve seen at the border,” he said.

But the agency will never be able to quickly process the migrants who pay the cartels to deliver them into U.S. jobs, Krikorian said.

Every human being in the United States could become an immigration judge, and you still couldn’t handle the demand because there is for all practical purposes unlimited [worldwide] demand [for the cartels’ delivery services] … If today’s illegal flow is accommodated — which is what the administration’s instinct is — then it will inevitably increase and you end up with Lucy in the Chocolate Factory. The only way to address it is to reduce the incentives that bring people here to begin with. Nothing else can work and nothing else will work.

Instead, Nunez-Neto described the migration problem as a humanitarian problem that creates risks to Biden’s poll ratings:

I think in general, our approach has been that we would like to see individuals using safe and orderly pathways and processes to come into the country … We think there’s a significant public benefit associated with channeling people into these lawful processes and reducing, importantly, the number of encounters [with illegal migrants] we see in between ports of entry who end up in the immigration court system.

The logistics perspective helps explain why the administration is trying to grab market share from the cartels by offering lower-cost and safer alternative routes into U.S. workplaces. But the cartels are also using these quasi-legal pathways — such as the CBP One sidedoor in the border — to get their paying clients into U.S. jobs.

Many of Biden’s migrants are pitiable, many are admirable, and most are eager to work, and all were unlucky to be born outside the United States. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported:

Mary Otaiyi, 33, of Nigeria, carried her sleeping 4-year-old on her back while holding her 10-year-old’s hand. She said they had flown to Brazil, then walked and bused through Bolivia, Peru and onward into Mexico, taking a month to get to America.

”I came for a good life for my kids,” she said. “I have no relatives here and no job in Nigeria.”

I think his admission has to lead to the conclusion that asylum itself has to be fundamentally reworked… It’s a post-World War Two anachronism. You know, we’re not doing anything else like we did in 1951. Why would this policy that was designed for an entirely different world still in place? ….When it was few hundred Russian ballerinas [claiming asylum], it didn’t make any difference. But now that [migration via] asylum has become a fundamental threat to the sovereignty of developed countries, not just the U.S., but Europe and Israel and Australia

Biden’s deputies, he said, are viscerally unable to solve the problem, Krikorian added:

They’re going to continue to engage in wishful thinking while hoping that some Tweet will fix the problem. They are unwilling to face the cognitive dissonance between their immigration policy preferences and objective reality. Maybe at some point, we’ll get a person or person or persons in authority who see actually draw the conclusion and change their policy views, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Certainly, not anybody who wants to keep their job.

While Congress fails to act, Krikorian said, rational migrants join with the cartels to move into the United States: “They’re ordinary folks who are making perfectly rational decisions given the incentives that we have created.”