Former officials warned Monday the Biden administration is making the border crisis worse after reports that hundreds of thousands of migrants will be allowed to remain in the U.S. with what amounts to amnesty.
"They haven't done a single thing to slow the flow. And I guarantee you, the executive action … is going to be another insult on the American legal system," said former acting ICE Director Tom Homan on "Fox & Friends First."
A report released last month by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data gathering organization that tracks immigration cases and backlogs, shows that since 2022, over 350,000 asylum cases filed by migrants were closed by the U.S. government on the basis that those who filed did not have a criminal record or were not deemed a threat to the U.S.
The New York Post called the move "Biden's mass amnesty."
The White House is finalizing plans for a U.S.-Mexico border clampdown that would shut off asylum requests and automatically deny entrance to migrants once the number of people encountered by American border officials exceeded a new daily threshold, with President Biden expected to sign an executive order as early as Tuesday, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The move would allow Biden, whose administration has taken smaller steps in recent weeks to discourage migration and speed up asylum processing, to say he has done all he can do to control the border numbers without help from Congress.
Homan said the Biden administration is well aware of the issues with aslyum cases.
"The Biden administration knows what I know, that based on immigration court data in the last 10 years, nine out of 10 of these people claim asylum at the border won't win a case. They'll be ordered removed because they either don't show up in court or they don't qualify," he said.
"This administration knows exactly what they're doing. They know these people get removed or deported. They don't want that. They'd rather they be here illegally and wait … to be counted in the next Census, which would benefit the Democrats. They've got a plan and this is their plan."
Former President Trump said on "Fox & Friends Weekend" that he will order the largest-ever deportation if elected in November.
"[Biden] doesn't need any legislation, he could say the word and close the border. That's what I did. I said, close the border. I'm going to do the big deportation. The biggest ever. Eisenhower did the biggest. This will be bigger. But it's a very tough thing. What they've done to our country is unthinkable."
Homan agreed with Trump, saying deportations are the only way to enforce the law and discourage illegal immigration.
"They must be removed, because if you don't, what the hell are we doing? There's a right way to come in this country. There's a wrong way. … We need to reward those coming the right way and punish those coming the wrong way," said Homan.
Retired Border Patrol agent Chris Clem said on "Fox & Friends" that the Biden administration should have dealt with the issue a long time ago.
"Why are we waiting until five minutes from the election?" he asked Monday.
Clem described the anticipated executive order as, "a Band-Aid on an arterial bleed that was created by this administration."
"This is something that is not going to be completely effective on what they're trying to accomplish, when you put a target number of up to 4,000 a day is what we believe. I mean, that's still almost a half a million people between now and the end of this election cycle, because that's what it's all about," said Clem.
The immigration court backlog has grown from 2.8 million at the end of Fiscal Year 2023 to nearly 3.6 million in FY 2024, with immigration judges being unable to keep up with the current flow of new cases into the system.
The number of new cases filed as well as the number of cases completed by immigration judges are both on pace to exceed all-time highs this year, the TRAC report notes, though the pace of completions will be unable to stem the growing backlog.
Fox News' Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
