March 6, 2024
By Katelyn Caralle
No. 3 House Republican Elise Stefanik is the latest to tear into revelations of a program last year that used taxpayer funds to fly 320,000 undocumented immigrants directly from foreign countries to U.S. airports.
The report has ruffled feathers among Republican politicians, border hawks and anti-illegal immigration activists and even Elon Musk.
‘Not only is Joe Biden ignoring his border crisis, he’s facilitating it with taxpayer dollars. This is an assault on our national security and American safety,’ Rep. Stefanik wrote on X, formerly Twitter, as she shared the DailyMail.com report of the secret flights.
The House Republican Conference Chairwoman echoes others who have called out the flights as legally ambiguous and a misuse of taxpayer funds.
Donald Trump capitalized on the recent revelations during his Super Tuesday victory remarks from Mar-a-Lago. The former president tore into his Democratic rival for lax border policies exacerbating the illegal immigration crisis in America.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report this week calling out lawyers for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for refusing to disclose the departure and arrival airports of these flights last year.
The report reiterates that some 320,000 illegal immigrants were flown into the U.S. by the Biden administration and released into the country with a two-year grace period for obtaining legal status.
It all is part of the expansion of the CBP One application, which allows migrants in certain countries south of the U.S. to apply for asylum and be transported to the country without having to traverse through the southern border.
This means while the border was overwhelmed with migrants every day, even more were being transported directly into the U.S. by Biden’s immigration agencies.
‘He’s the worst president in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like what’s happening to our country,’ Trump said of Biden during remarks from Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening after more than a dozen victories in primary elections across the country.
‘Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown. Migrants were flown in. Airplane – not going through borders,’ Trump noted. ‘Not going through that great Texas barrier that I was with the Governor of Texas Greg Abbott the other day and we were looking at the job they’re doing.’
Immigration is one of the largest issues cited by primary voters – especially in the southern border state of Texas.
Trump won with nearly 78 percent of the vote in the Republican primary race in Texas.
He took a victory lap with a speech at his golf club in Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday evening.
‘Today, it was just announced before I came out – it was unbelievable,’ Trump said during his remarks. ‘I said that must be a mistake.’
‘They flew 325,000 migrants. Flew them in, over the borders, into our country. So that really tells you where they’re coming from,’ the former president said of Biden and his Democratic administration. ‘They want open borders and open borders are going to destroy our country. We need borders and we need free and fair elections.’
Biden’s administration admitted transporting migrants on secret flights into the U.S., and lawyers for CBP claim revealing the locations could create national security ‘vulnerabilities’.
The program emerged from Biden’s expansion of the CBP One app, which last year allowed foreign nationals from several countries south of the U.S. to apply for asylum from online rather than travel to the border.
Aliens who cannot legally enter the U.S. used the CBP One to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those unnamed airports. Under this parole release, migrants are able to remain in the U.S. for two years without obtaining legal status and meanwhile are eligible for work authorization.
Billionaire owner of Tesla, X and SpaceX, Elon Musk, posted the DailyMail.com article of the CIS revelations through their Freedom of Information ACt (FOIA) lawsuit against the Biden administration.
He said the program is a way for Democrats to bring in more voters that rely on left-leaning policies and programs like the CBP One app.
‘This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,’ Musk wrote in his X post.
He predicted: ‘It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time.’
CBP has refused to disclose information about a program secretly arranging flights for thousands of undocumented immigrants from foreign airports directly to U.S. cities from January through December 2023.
It means that while record numbers of migrants were flowing over the southern border last year, the Biden White House was also directly transporting them into the country.
Use of a cell phone app has allowed for the near undetected arrival by air of 320,000 aliens with no legal rights to enter the United States.
It comes after a controversy over a 2022 transportation program in which the administration used taxpayers money to move migrants throughout the country on overnight flights.
Included in details of a FOIA lawsuit first reported by Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies found Biden’s CBP approved the latest secretive flights that transported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from foreign countries into at least 43 different American airports from January through December 2023.
The program was part of Biden’s expansion of the CBP One app, which kicked off at the start of last year.
Migrants were able, under Biden’s expansion, to apply for asylum using the app from their home countries.
But the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) notes that the transportation of these migrants directly to the U.S. is one of the lesser known uses of the app.
Aliens who cannot legally enter the U.S. use CBP One to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports.
Under this parole release, migrants are able to remain in the U.S. for two years without obtaining legal status and meanwhile are eligible for work authorization.
The administration first said it would not reveal which airports the undocumented aliens were transported, citing a ‘law enforcement exception’ in the refusal to hand over information.
But new information from CIS lawsuit reveals the locations were not disclosed due to fear ‘bad actors’ would inflict harm on public safety or the information would create law enforcement vulnerabilities.
CBP lawyers wrote that revealing the airports would ‘reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended at particular airports.’
That would in turn reveal ‘operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures.’
They added this could ‘thereby undermin[e] CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders.’
But Republicans insist the southern border is not secure, and are demanding Biden implement more strict protocols between the U.S. and Mexican border.
CIS says the secretive flights are ‘legally dubious’ and claim since CBP will not disclose the locations for fear of ‘grave’ consequences, it is likely not a program that should continue.
Lawyers also did not disclose the locations of foreign airport departures, making it unclear where these migrants are coming from.
But those eligible for the CBP One applications are citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Ecuador.
