The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss the number of unlawful migrants crossing the southern border, determining that Biden administration policies have made it harder to deport criminal migrants.
This hearing was held to evaluate the ongoing crisis along the southern border due to an influx of migrants crossing into the U.S. unlawfully, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting record-high numbers of encounters.
A summary of this hearing from the House Committee states that policies implemented by the Biden administration have resulted in “many criminal illegal aliens not being deported and allowed to roam and harm U.S. communities across the nation.”
Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn was one of two sheriffs to testify at the hearing. He said that his county has seen “numerous effects” of the border crisis, explaining how the county has “seen health issues, including mental health, increase rapidly due to 1000% plus increase of available drugs entering across the border.”
“While the economic impact is one thing, the toll on human lives is another, one of which cannot be calculated … we see 264 people with detainers, with over 170 violent crimes. These crimes include murder, sex assault of children, victimization of the elderly, and the list goes on. These offenders, which many are gang members and outlaws, have left nothing untouched,” he added, per the House Committee.
This hearing also featured testimony from Ken Cuccinelli, senior fellow for Immigration and Homeland Security at the Center for Renewing America.
Asked by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) how “policies put in place by Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security that have disempowered ICE, allowing criminal aliens to roam free terrorizing American citizens,” Cuccinelli answered, “the administration, through [DHS] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas, intentionally made it difficult for both CBP and ICE to accomplish their missions.”
This echoed an earlier statement of his in which he said, “the way to think of those early memos, like the first one there early in 2021, is that they were attempting to tie their own shoelaces together. They literally took steps at ICE and CBP to make it harder for them to achieve their mission structurally.”
Cuccinelli claimed that these bureaucratic hurdles are part of why “morale in those two organization[s] is as low as it has ever been.”
“Because you sign up to do a job and then are actually impaired by your leadership from doing that job. And that’s reflected by the number of criminals that are coming into their custody — when CBP is catching and releasing 85% of their apprehensions, ICE doesn’t even see most of these folks,” he explained.
Mayorkas has pushed back on claims that 85% of unlawful migrants were released back into the U.S., but National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd confirmed that he heard Mayorkas make these statements.
Rep. Williams Timmons (R-SC) later presented questions to Waybourn about why the Biden administration would prevent criminal migrants from being deported, to which Waybourn said he was unable to give a definitive answer.
“I’m afraid I don’t know why this is. I know Speaker Johnson spoke the other day that there are people in Congress who would like to be able to give them the ability to vote so I think it is maybe a political issue such as that,” he said.
Cuccinelli shared a similar sentiment when questioned by Rep. Mace, saying the Biden admin is “not deporting them even when they do commit serious crimes and I can only conclude that they want the border invasion — that they have open[ed] the borders for their own reasons.”
Concerns about election integrity have been rampant leading into the presidential election in November, recently amplified by a Mexican non-governmental agency allegedly encouraging potentially unlawful migrants to vote for Biden.
A flyer was allegedly distributed to potential migrants at the NGO Resource Center Matamoros in Tamaulipas, Mexico, that encouraged those traveling to the U.S. to vote for Biden in the election, despite citizens being the only people eligible to vote in the country.
“Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open,” read the flyer, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
