The chaos and multifaceted crises created by President Joe Biden's open-border policies has been covered for years by Townhall. Those reports are based on publicly available data released by the Biden administration, anecdotal evidence provided by border officials in states such as Texas and Arizona, and court filings from removal proceedings. But now, new nonpublic data has been released that makes it clear, from the federal government's ledgers, that the border is wide open and getting worse by the week — just as the Biden administration wants.
Obtained by the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Jim Jordan of Ohio, the nonpublic data was released Thursday in an interim staff report along with other border statistics obtained by lawmakers. As the executive summary from the committee notes, it was already known that "Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered a record-breaking 269,735 illegal aliens along the southwest border in September 2023, shattering the previous record of 252,315 encounters in December 2022" and it took just three months for CBP to tell Fox News that December 2023 had already broken the previous record with more than 302,000 illegal immigrant encounters along the border — all while Biden and his administration keep refusing to call the situation a "crisis."
"With such a large and seemingly unending influx of illegal aliens into the United States, Americans would be right to conclude that the border crisis is not a side effect, but instead a goal, of the Biden Administration’s radical open-borders immigration policies," the report emphasizes before recounting the data uncovered by the committee that confirms such a conclusion.
For example, Biden's catch-and-release policy shows barely an iota of interest in removing illegal immigrants once they've been nabbed or turned themselves in. After almost 6,000,000 illegal immigrant encounters from Biden's first day in office through the end of September 2023, there are "at least 3,095,577" who "had no confirmed departure from the United States as of September 30, 2023.
In addition, more than 615,000 illegal immigrants currently sit on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "non-detained docket." That means "more than half a million criminal aliens are on the streets and free to reoffend in U.S. communities."
The report also notes that 1,323,264 illegal immigrants who'd already received "final orders of removal" remained inside the U.S. as of December 10, 2023.
Those numbers are no surprise given additional data showing that the Biden administration did not remove via immigration court proceedings "roughly 99.7 percent" of some 3.3 million-plus illegal immigrants released into the U.S. since Biden took office. According to the data obtained by the Judiciary Committee, Biden's administration "has removed only one illegal alien for every 26 illegal aliens it has allowed to enter the United States."
When it comes to the rare instances in which the Biden administration pretends to enforce U.S. sovereignty at the border, it also fails and demonstrates its lack of interest in securing the border.
In one data point, it turns out that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) led by embattled Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas "placed only 6.8 percent of illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border into proceedings to even be screened for asylum eligibility."
The same agency, as of August 31,2023, had also only removed "2 percent of illegal aliens who failed to appear at their immigration court hearings after successfully establishing a fear of persecution at the border" meaning 98 percent of such illegal immigrants "remained in the United States at the end of August 2023," according to the data.
With the data showing the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens — even criminal aliens — being allowed to stay in the U.S. without penalty, it's no wonder the surge of illegal immigrants crossing the border continues to get worse. President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas, in recent weeks, have continued to deny that the border is in "crisis." Instead, the administration continues to sue states — mainly Texas — for actually trying to enforce the international border and stem the flow of illegal immigrants seeking to answer the invitation issued by the Biden administration's open-border policies.