Former acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Chad Wolf on Wednesday accused the Biden administration of using a technical scheme involving a phone app to coverup the magnitude of recent illegal immigration.
In January 2023, DHS expanded the use of a mobile app, created by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for illegal immigrants to make appointments at a port of entry to file asylum claims. Already, there is “an immense amount of fraud in asylum process,” Wolf said at a “dereliction of duty” hearing targeting current DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The app was originally designed to facilitate trade and commerce across the border, former chief of the U.S. border patrol Rodney Scott said during his testimony. Now, it’s being used to grant parole to illegal immigrants who would otherwise have no legitimate claim to enter the U.S., which is “not consistent with its original purpose,” Scott said.
Once illegal immigrants schedule an appointment at a port of entry to claim asylum, they are promptly released into the interior to await resolution of their claim, Wolf noted. Muddling the asylum process, the app does not ask migrant arrivals any questions to confirm and verify whether or why they’re seeking asylum, Wolf added.
“Since January 2023, Secretary Mayorkas has been engaging in a shell game at the expense of the American people by painting otherwise unlawful border crossings as legal entries,” House Committee on Homeland Security chairman Mark Green said in a statement. “The Biden administration’s abuse of the CBP One app at ports of entry is just a new iteration of catch-and-release—and one that may only further empower cartels, who now have a new human smuggling tool at their disposal. Just one month after the termination of Title 42, it’s clear that Secretary Mayorkas never had a plan to secure our border or end this crisis; he just had a scheme to hide it in plain sight.”
The dubious app strategy, Wolf said, is in violation of the law. “It’s another smoke and mirrors for how to bring in individuals, who have no legal right, to come into the country,” he said.
While immigration parole is not uncommon, it is meant to be given on a case-by-case basis. The app, however, has enabled the Biden administration to grant it in a “categorical” manner, which is “at the heart of all of this,” Wolf said.
“Paroling up to 360,000 individuals violates the letter of the law,” he added.
When President Biden assumed office, border patrol’s relationship with the administration fundamentally changed, according to Scott, who served under Biden and former president Trump. Upon meeting with Mayorkas, “it was clear deterrence was no longer their mission,” Scott said of the Biden administration’s plans to no longer make border enforcement a priority.
The new goal, Scott said, was to “expedite processing and find new ways to let migrants in.” In contrast to the Trump years, when the administration consulted border patrol often, Mayorkas didn’t ask for their input and when advice was given unsolicited, it was ignored, Scott said.
DHS officials in late May told CBS News that they planned to dramatically scale up the asylum process by admitting nearly 40,000 migrants at official crossings each month and converting the CBP One app into the main avenue for entry. That would entail providing 1,250 appointments a day, the DHS officials told the outlet.
In April, a CBP spokesperson told Fox News that 75,000 asylum applications had either been filed or scheduled until April 25, and that appointments fill at a very fast rate when they open up. Before Title 42, the Trump-backed pandemic-era policy that allowed authorities to expel migrants as a means to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, migrants could use the app to ask for an exception. Title 42 expired last month.
A few days after the policy was rolled back, Department of Homeland Security official Blas Nunez-Neto bragged to reporters that the daily average of illegal border encounters had dropped, Fox News reported.
“Since the National Public Health Emergency and our enforcement of Title 42 at the border expired on May 12, we continue to see encouraging signs that the measures we have put in place are working,” he said. “I want to stress once again that it is still too soon to draw any firm conclusions here about where these trends will go in the coming days and weeks. And we continue to monitor the situation on our border and in Mexico and along the transit routes in real time.”