A former senior Trump administration official plans to testify Wednesday that the Biden administration has shown “flagrant disregard” for the law in handling immigration, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
Former acting U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS) Director Joe Edlow will point to several Biden administration policies, including limits on immigration enforcement, according to a copy of his testimony the DCNF obtained. Border Patrol recorded more than 2.2 million encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally in fiscal year 2022, more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023 and is already seeing new highs in fiscal year 2023, when December encounters surpassed 300,000, according to Fox News.
Edlow, who is now on the advisory board of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE), will testify as part of the House Oversight Committees hearing, entitled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.”
“The Biden Administration has taken many immigration and border security actions in the past three years but simply enforcing the law as written was never one of the options. The memos, regulatory actions, and other policy-making efforts have been singularly focused on bringing in more individuals without viable claims to remain in the United States in flagrant disregard of the law as Congress intended,” Edlow’s testimony reads.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations haven’t kept up with the pace of illegal immigration under Biden’s tenure. ICE has only removed noncitizens at a rate of 3.5% of the aggregate number of encounters between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, compared to the 32% aggregate rate between fiscal year 2017 and 2020, Edlow’s testimony notes.
Recently, the DCNF spoke with a migrant who crossed into the U.S. illegally and was released pending his asylum case. The migrant thanked the president for his “help” in getting himself and his friends to the U.S.
“These actions have created instability, not only for national security, public safety, and the economy, but for the aliens themselves who are allowed to remain in a quasi-status akin to limbo. The efforts undertaken by the Administration have simply undermined our system and need to be reversed immediately,” Edlow’s testimony reads.
Jennie Taer on January 17, 2024
