The Biden administration doesn’t want to admit there is a border crisis because “they created it,” Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Wednesday.
“They don’t have to admit it’s a crisis,” Homan, now a Fox News contributor, told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings With Maria.” “The American people can do the math. This month they’ll have over 100,000 apprehensions, which is almost a 300% increase over the same time period last year. When you increase illegal apprehensions by 300%, that’s a crisis.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Monday asked his department’s staff to volunteer to help with the “overwhelming” number of migrants at the border, saying in an email to staff, seen by Fox News, that he had “activated the Volunteer Force to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they face a surge in migration along the Southwest Border.”
“You have likely seen the news about the overwhelming numbers of migrants seeking access to this country along the Southwest Border,” he said in the memo. “President [Joe] Biden and I are committed to ensuring our nation has a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system while continuing to balance all of the other critical DHS missions.”
Homan told Bartiromo that the number of children in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol is at an all-time high, and accused the Biden administration of “ignoring” the crisis.
“We had the most secure border we ever had under President [Donald] Trump,” said Homan. “They picked it apart over a two-week period. Now we have a crisis that they created. This is not by accident. This is by design.”
Trump Tuesday night slammed Biden’s handling of the border and said the United States is being “destroyed” by the current surge of migrants, reports Fox News. He added in his statement that the border, under his watch, was “in great shape” and “stronger, safer, and more secure than ever before,” and that the border wall “would have easily” been finished if Democrats hadn’t stalled its construction.
Homan said the Biden administration has done two things that “really hurt” the border effort, and did them “by design,” rather than making a mistake.
“First, they basically abolished ICE,” he said. “The rest of the world knows that ICE has been crippled, [because] 90% of their authority is taken away. There’s no interior enforcement. If you get [past] Border Control, no one is looking for you.”
The administration also ended Trump’s “remain in Mexico” program, which has also been harmful, said Homan, because “88% to 90% of Central Americans who claim asylum never get released from the U.S. courts because they don’t show up or they don’t qualify.”
Homan pointed out that Mayorkas was a deputy secretary during the immigration surge in 2014 and 2015, so “they know how we stopped the border surge back then. We did it by building detention centers and detaining people, not by seeing how quickly we will release them, and allowing ICE to execute final decisions by courts to have the people removed.”
Source: Newmax
