A new report from the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General contains some unsurprising but still sobering admissions about the Biden administration's ability to track down illegal immigrants who are apprehended after unlawfully entering the U.S. and then released into the United States. The title of the report released on Monday — "DHS Does Not Have Assurance That All Migrants Can be Located Once Released into the United States" — makes the reality clear.
New Report: "DHS Does Not Have Assurance That All Migrants Can be Located Once Released into the United States (REDACTED)" https://t.co/tksTnkw2Pn
— DHS Office of Inspector General (@DHSOIG) September 11, 2023
Citing the "more than 1 million" illegal immigrants released by DHS after they were captured unlawfully breaching America's borders as the reason for the audit, the Office of Inspector General noted how "DHS personnel are required to obtain an address when possible" for illegal immigrants before their release. "We conducted this audit to determine the extent to which DHS accurately and effectively tracks migrants' post-release addresses" within the U.S.
The audit reviewed U.S. Border Patrol records for 981,671 illegal immigrants dated March 2021 to August 2022 and found "addresses for more than 177,000...were either missing, invalid for delivery, or not legitimate residential locations."
Part of the issue, according to the Inspector General report, fell on USBP for a failure to "accurately and effectively capture valid addresses, in part due to the large number of migrants apprehended, as well as its limited coordination with ICE and its limited authority to administer compliance with address requirements," in addition to ICE lacking "adequate resources to validate and analyze migrants' post-release addresses."
That is, as a result of the Biden administration's open-border policies that caused record numbers of illegal immigrants to unlawfully enter the U.S., the system was overwhelmed — leading to more failures as a result of Biden's policies. More evidence for how Biden's policies have failed to address the surge of illegal crossings and caused a ripple effect of downstream failures is the report's note that "the number of missing addresses increased across all sectors during two separate migrant surges that occurred from March through August 2021, and from February through March 2022."
The inability to locate illegal immigrants who have been apprehended and then released mean federal officials are likely to be unable to "arrest or remove individuals who are considered potential threats to national security," another alarming result of Biden's policies.
Even when valid addresses are entered by border officials before releasing an illegal immigrant into the United States, the current guidance for authorities only asks them to "type migrants’ intended destinations into USBP’s system of record," meaning a technically valid address might not be where the illegal immigrant actually ends up. Providing a phony but valid address could also be used to throw immigration officials off the trail of someone seeking to disappear into the U.S. without being easily tracked or found again by authorities.
The Inspector General review provided examples of some technically "valid" addresses that clearly were not where the illegal immigrant who provided them could be easily found, such as a restaurant in Maryland, church in Illinois, bus station in Georgia, car dealership in New Jersey, and even one of DHS' own offices in Illinois.
According to the audit report, illegal immigrants also routinely share common addresses, indicating the reuse of some locations based on families following other relatives or information regurgitated based on guidance from smugglers. Some 80 percent of addresses reviewed were "recorded at least twice," the report notes, and "[m]ore than 780 of these addresses were used more than 20 times."
The full OIG report with recommendations and DHS replies can be viewed below: