Tipsheet

Reports: Democratic Congresswoman's Staff Is Coaching Illegals On Loophole That Could Allow Re-Entry

We have border apprehensions reaching or soaring past 100,000 for the past few months. Border detention facilities are filled to the brim. Luckily, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell passed a border package of $4.6 billion to help the Department of Homeland Security deal with the crisis; DHS had warned that they were running out of cash to deal with all the migrants. House Democrats are to blame for the delayed relief. They thought this crisis wasn’t real. They sat on their hands until the overcrowding offered them an opportunity to weaponize the suffering of these people against the Trump White House. It’s a classic Democratic move. Working with this administration is anathema to the Democratic base. On the far left, any money to DHS is seen as funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As we deal with this crisis, we have reports that a Democratic congresswoman is sending staff down coaching illegal aliens on a language loophole that could allow them to re-enter the country. Sources at Border Patrol spoke with The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli about these allegations lobbed at Rep. Veronica Escobar’s (D-TX) office:

A Democratic congresswoman is sending staff to Mexico’s northern border town of Ciudad Juárez to find migrants returned from El Paso, Texas, under the “remain in Mexico” policy, then coaching them to pretend they cannot speak Spanish to exploit a loophole letting them to return to the U.S.

The National Border Patrol Council’s El Paso chapter and several Customs and Border Protection personnel told the Washington Examineraides to Rep. Veronica Escobar, who took over 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s district, and the local Catholic diocese have interviewed thousands of migrants in Juarez over the past few weeks to find cases where Department of Homeland Security officials may have wrongly returned people.

“What we believe is happening is Veronica Escobar’s office is going … to basically second-guess and obstruct work already done by the Border Patrol,” said one senior union official, who shared evidence with the Washington Examiner from concerned CBP managers and rank-and-file members. Those documents have been held to protect identities.

Under the bilateral Migration Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico” policy, anyone returned must be fluent in Spanish because they may have to reside in Mexico up to five years until a U.S. federal judge decides their asylum claim. A Democratic politician's aides reescorting people back to the port are telling officers the Central American individual with them cannot speak Spanish despite their having communicated in it days earlier, CBP officials said.

“What we’re hearing from management is that they’re attempting to return people, and the story was changed in Mexico, where a person who understood Spanish before now doesn’t understand — where a person who didn’t have any health issues before now has health issues," the union representative said.

[…]

In one incident, an Escobar aide and diocese official walked a male migrant over the bridge in June and asked for him to be admitted into the U.S. because they had found he had "cognitive disabilities." Officers took the boy and turned the case over to the Border Patrol, where an agent found a Constituent Information and Privacy Release Form with the U.S. House of Representatives seal on it inside the 17-year-old's file. Two officials said the paper would have to have been put in his file while he was interviewed in Mexico and was not supposed to have been left there because it would reveal to the Border Patrol that a member of Congress or their staff was meeting with migrants in Mexico.

The boy has since returned to Mexico because the medical condition was not diagnosed by a medical professional but by an aide of the congresswoman, one official said Friday.

Well, that is the big elephant in the room: the asylum law that has to be changed. It won’t happen under the Democratic House. And even if the GOP manages to retake the lower chamber in November of 2020, it faces another procedural hurdle in the Senate. Oh, and the Left will go indiscriminately insane. The vast majority of these so-called asylum claims are trash. And while I support the building of a border wall, it does little to prevent the flow of asylum claims. While the Trump White House has done some solid things concerning the economy, job creation, and rebuilding the military, the border situation remains unresolved. This was a core 2016 promise and one that he has to navigate on the campaign trail since he’s fallen short. Granted, he’s the only person that is trustworthy to enforce our immigration laws and bolster border security, but the results remain to be seen. We need that wall. We need to fix the asylum laws. We just have to wait and hunker down until the next election.  

As for Rep. Escobar, well, she could land in hot water for perpetrating immigration fraud if these allegations turn out to be true. Giaritelli spoke with former immigration judge under Bush, Mark H. Metcalf, who says that Escobar’s actions are more likely to be a political stunt and something get a dialogue started than something that could actually gum up the works. Yet, Judge Metcalf added that the whole ballgame could change if evidence was produced showing that she or her office “knowingly injecting false statements during interviews, follow-up conversations, and documents presented to U.S. officials.”

And of course, Escobar responded: