SAN DIEGO AND TIJUANA—With tens of thousands of illegal aliens expected to rush the U.S.–Mexico border in San Diego on May 12 after the Biden’s administration’s planned expiration of public health restrictions on immigration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are bracing for chaos.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing 18,000 Border Patrol agents and support personnel, told The Epoch Times as many as 13,000 illegal migrants a day are expected to cross with the collapse of Title 42 at 11:59 p.m. on May 11.
“I would say that we’re looking at a minimum of 13,000,” Judd said on May 10. “We’ve arrested more than 10,000 people per day, for the last three days, and that number just continues to go up.”
Those estimates could reach 16,000 per day if nothing is done to halt the incursion.
The restrictions are known as Title 42, a law enacted in 1944 allowing the federal government to curb immigration to protect public health. The Trump administration imposed these restrictions at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic three years ago after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended limiting immigration to reduce the spread of disease.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has steadfastly denied there is a border “crisis,” blamed Congress for failing to fix the “broken immigration system” for more than two decades and called for “legislative reform,” at a press conference on May 10.
Mayorkas said migrants who cross the border illegally without being properly processed will be ineligible for asylum.
But, Judd said, the Biden administration of misleading the public.
“That’s a half-truth at best,” he said.
While people caught illegally crossing the border will be told they can’t claim asylum under the new rule, they will still have the right to appeal, and because the border patrol can’t hold them until their appeal hearings, they will be released into the United States.
“They’re telling the American people what the intention of the rule is, but they’re not telling them the practical application of the rule,” he said.
Detention facilities are already three times over capacity, leaving the border patrol no choice but to release illegal immigrants.
“We’re doing mass releases,” he said. “Now, it’s just mass releases to the street because we can’t hold this many people.”
More than two years of lax border policies have led to this massive influx of illegal migrants and strained the system, turning agents who once patrolled the southern border into desk clerks who process asylum claims, he said.
“It pulls resources from patrolling the border,” he said. “That’s what arrests mean to us.”
At 10,000 ‘arrests’ a day, about 70 percent of border patrol agents are doing administrative duties, he said, adding the Biden administration prefers to use the word ‘apprehensions’ “to make it sound nicer.”
Currently, cartels only control certain areas of the southwest border, but as border patrol agents are increasingly overwhelmed, they will control “every inch” of it, he said.
“If we hit 16,000 apprehensions, we’re looking at literally only having 10 percent of our resources patrolling the border, and at that point, cartels will own the border.”
Aside from arrests, thousands of “got-aways” cross the southern border illegally every day, Judd said.
“We’ve had roughly 3,000 got-aways that we were able to detect. We don’t know what they’re carrying. Every one of them carries backpacks, and we see these backpacks filled with fentanyl on a regular basis,” he said. “We’re losing so many U.S. citizens to fentanyl, and that’s just going to open up the floodgates.”
And, an estimated 25 to 35 percent of undetected got-aways “easily” brings that number to well over 4,000 a day, Judd said.
Manny Bayon, who represents the National Border Patrol Council in San Diego, told The Epoch Times that border patrol dropped off hundreds of illegal migrants at the Crowne Plaza hotel, in San Diego on May 11.
“It used to be a beautiful hotel here a couple years ago … and now the NGOs have taken over,” he said.
Several buses and smaller border patrol vans transported illegal immigrants to the hotel on May 11. The hotel’s parking lot is guarded by security and barricaded with high chain-link fence covered with green visual barriers.
“You can’t see, but that’s where we’re dropping them off,” Bayon said.
Once NGO-run facilities reach capacity and stop accepting new illegal immigrants, they will be dropped off at the nearest train, trolley, and bus stations, he said.
The illegal immigrants are coming from more than 120 countries.
Bayon said he was told at a Wednesday morning briefing that two migrants from Afghanistan were on a terror watch and are being interviewed by the FBI and CIA.
“I call it an invasion,” Bayon said. “This morning, we were told if you get large groups in the field, hold them there until there’s room at the stations.”
But, he said, there are no rooms at the stations.
On May 9, about 2,500 illegal immigrants were released in San Diego, Bayon said.
Bayon said the Biden administration and Mayorkas have done nothing to ease the strain on the immigration system.
“He is trying to look good in front of everybody,” he said. “We’ve been telling him, it’s broken, we need to fix it. He doesn’t do anything.”
Mayorkas halted repairs to the border wall, leaving “huge gaps” that act as funnels for illegal border crossings, he said.
Meanwhile in Mexico
At the San Ysidro border crossing, U.S. federal agents prepared for increases in migration on May 11 by placing barrier fencing around several vehicle lanes that connected with the pedestrian entryway.Foot traffic was heavier than usual for Thursday afternoon, with more than 1,000 people standing in line to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents.
South of the border along the Tijuana River, migrants of all ages clutching infants and bags holding personal belongings walked down steep embankments to cross a small concrete bridge headed toward San Diego.
On the southern side of the riverbank, Mexico National Guard troopers watched the migrants while a small unit of U.S. Border Patrol agents monitored their movement from inside SUVs posted near an open section American border wall.
With just a 10-minute walk to the border, the migrants hastened their pace as Tijuana municipal police arrived at the scene.
Chaos Expected
President Joe Biden told reporters on May 9 the southern border is “going to be chaotic for a while,” and Mayorkas warned migrants headed to the border that the lifting of Title 42 doesn’t mean an “open border,” but “tougher consequences” for anyone who crosses the border illegally.”On Friday, the United States returned to Title 8 immigration code. The federal government is also considering a new rule which would deny asylum to migrants at the border who travel through another country before Mexico. It would also expedite the process, and those deemed not to have “a credible fear” and deported can be denied reentry to the United States for five years.
Currently, most asylum seekers are currently allowed passage into the country pending immigration court appearances, but according to Judd, usually only one in every 10 show up for their final immigration hearings.
Mayorkas urged migrants not to risk their lives and life savings only to be turned away at the border and implored them not to trust human smugglers, known as “coyotes,” who’ve told them the border will be open after May 11.
“It will not be. They are lying,” Mayorkas said.
Riverside County
In Riverside County, about an hour’s drive north of the border, busloads of illegal migrants have been arriving daily at Murrieta, Blythe, and Indio for more than two years under the Biden administration’s border policies, and volumes are expected to increase.The Galilee Center, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Meccas, California, has been accepting busloads from the inland border patrol station in Indio which handles the overflow of migrants from Yuma, Arizona.
Gloria Gomez, who runs the center, told The Epoch Times on May 11 the facility is still accepting migrants.
“We’ve got plenty of room,” she said.
Gomez wouldn’t speculate on how the end of Title 42 could impact the Galilee Center or elaborate on details about operations at the facility.
In 2021, she said, the center had been receiving 75 to 100 migrants daily from the inland border patrol station in Indio.
In October 2021, Gomez told The Epoch Times the center was founded by Catholics out of an “obligation to serve the poor and the needy.”
“Every human being is Jesus to us, and we are supposed to be treating everybody with dignity, love, and respect regardless [of] who they are or where they’re coming from,” she said. “I understand that there’s bad people here who are drug addicts, but let’s be truthful, we’ve got Americans who are bad people, too.”
The center was founded in July 2010, during the Obama administration, to help migrant farm workers, but expanded to assist asylum seekers in 2018, she said.
“We went from there and have not stopped,” she said. “The border patrol … brings the people to us, otherwise they were going to be in the streets.”
The NGO is supported mainly through private donations but also receives funds from the State of California and Riverside County, she said. It provides food, clothing, and shelter and helps asylum seekers contact their sponsors in the United States.
Asylum seekers must have a sponsor in the United States, and most don’t stay in California, she said.
“I think only like maybe three percent stay in the state of California. The rest they go beyond that, mostly to the east. I’m talking about Florida. I’m talking about New York, I’m talking about Washington, D.C. I’m talking about Texas,” she said.
Gomez said illegal immigrants have been “living in the shadows” for decades since the Reagan Amnesty, or Immigration Reform and Control Act, was enacted in 1986.
“They want a better life … because they’re persecuted in their countries and they have nothing to eat,” she said.
Sheriff’s Warning
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco wrote on Facebook on May 10 that he had spent the day with the border patrol in the El Centro Sector “to see firsthand the disaster at our border.”“We need to be extremely grateful for our dedicated Border Patrol officers because our government is failing them,” he said. “We are being lied to by the people in Washington D.C. and our media. Smugglers and drug cartels have a free pass. We encountered over 500 people crossing just today where we were.”
Bianco told The Epoch Times the border patrol is overwhelmed.
Once the asylum seekers cross and surrender to the border patrol, the agents “are forced by the Biden administration to process them and give them papers,” Bianco said in a text message. “They let them go, now they are legally in the U.S. capable of working and staying indefinitely.”
In a CNN live town hall meeting on May 10, former President Donald Trump said May 11 will be known as “a day of infamy” over the expiration of Title 42 restrictions.
If reelected for a second term as president in 2024, Trump indicated he wouldn’t rule out reimplementing the immigration policies he imposed in his first term.
“We have to save our country,” he said. “Look at New York City. Look what’s happening. They’re living in Central Park in New York City. The city is being swamped. Los Angeles is being swamped. Iowa is being swamped.”
The Biden administration should have extended Title 42 and curbed immigration, but instead has allowed millions of people from 129 different countries into the United States in two years, he said.
“They’re destroying our country, and this should not be allowed to happen.”
While he acknowledged the Title 42 policies were imposed under the auspices of reducing the spread of COVID-19, he said the United States should still have public health safeguards.
“If people are sick and have infectious diseases and lots of other problems, we don’t want them,” he said. “We have enough problems right now. We have problems like we’ve never had in the history of our country.”
Trump wouldn’t rule out his zero-tolerance immigration policy, which was blamed for families separations at the border.
“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come. If the family hears that they’re going to be separated. They love their family. They don’t come. So, I know it sounds harsh. But if you remember, they said I was building prisons for children. It turned out that it was Obama,” he said.
ICE-ing on the Cake
Meanwhile, the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do anything about the immigration problem has been curtailed with sanctuary cities and state policies.Tom Homan, former acting ICE director during the Trump administration, told The Epoch Times in October 2021 that the Biden administration has manufactured the border crisis “by design.”
“This crisis was created on purpose. This isn’t mismanagement. This isn’t incompetence. This is by design,” Homan said. “They planned open borders, and Joe Biden didn’t hide it.”
During his campaign, Biden vowed to end ICE detentions, put a moratorium on deportations, and made other promises “that he knew would cause a surge,” Homan said.
Economic Impacts
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said in a March 8 statement that according to its cost analysis “mass illegal immigration and misguided state policies that provide illegal alien[s] with benefits and services now cost California’s shrinking tax base nearly $31 billion a year.”The report (pdf) pegs combined federal, state, and local costs for K-12 education, indigent medical care, housing, and nutrition assistance associated with illegal immigration at $182 billion annually. It notes that California also provides illegal aliens with in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, health coverage under the state’s Medi-Cal program, and “sweeping sanctuary policies that shield illegal aliens from identification and removal.”
Benefits and services provided to the estimated 3.23 million illegal aliens in California cost local taxpayers $22.8 billion annually, and another $8 billion for about 1.15 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, according to the reports.
No Response
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to inquiries.Meanwhile on Thursday evening, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from implementing a policy that allows the release of illegal aliens without a court date. Judge T. Kent Wetherell II imposed a two-week restraining order on the policy outlined in a border patrol memo earlier this week. The memo stated migrants can be released into the U.S. on parole, a directive usually reserved for humanitarian reasons in emergencies.
Several American border cities have declared disasters due to the collapse of Title 42.
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