Biden Administration Approved ‘Secretive Flights’ Bringing 320,000 Illegal Immigrants to US: Report

Illegal immigrants utilize shelter services provided by nonprofit groups in San Diego, Calif., on Feb. 22, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

A new report reveals that the Biden administration has approved “secretive flights” transporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Latin America to U.S. airports.

The Biden administration “is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States” since late 2022, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington-based think tank, published on March 4.

The effort is part of the administration’s “lawful pathways” strategy to reduce the number of illegal crossings at the southern border, according to the report penned by Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the CIS.

The program allows asylum seekers to schedule an appointment using the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) phone app, known as CBP One, instead of rushing to the Texas border.

According to Mr. Bensman, the program allowed to bring “inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.”

“The countries whose citizens are eligible are Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador,” he wrote.

CIS has obtained this information by suing the Department of Homeland Security under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

CBP, however, has declined to reveal the names of these 43 airports, citing concerns about potential “operational vulnerabilities.”

Disclosing such information would reveal “operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures, thereby undermining CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders,” CBP’s lawyers, in email communications, told CIS.

Due to the overwhelming number of illegal immigrants moving into many large cities, according to CIS, airport location data would provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of the immigration crisis in the nation.

“Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports,” Mr. Bensman said in the report.

Migrants who obtain a CBP One appointment can apply for a work permit after being released from U.S. custody.

“Upon receiving authorization from Washington, they buy air passage to U.S. international airports, where CBP personnel process them for release in short order. All are said to be responsible for paying for their own airfare,” Mr. Bensman wrote.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Open Invitation’

In May 2022, The Epoch Times reported that Border Patrol had begun to employ—on a mass scale—a special “parole” exception that was previously used sparingly.

The parole designation made it possible for overwhelmed Border Patrol stations to process large numbers of illegal aliens and release them into the country much faster than the previous system allowed.

At the time, CIS argued that utilizing parole authority on a large scale goes against what Congress intended, labeling it as a “misuse and abuse” of immigration authority by the administration.

The administration has admitted over 1 million illegal immigrants into the United States under its parole authority over the past three years, CBS reported in January, citing internal government data.

According to Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at CIS, the Biden administration’s policies gave illegal immigrants an “open invitation” to the United States.

“Announcing and then implementing a massive catch-and-release policy, along with using parole authority to bring in hundreds of thousands of individuals without visas—it truly is an open door,” Ms. Vaughan told The Epoch Times.

“That message has been received loud and clear. And that’s why people keep coming in larger and larger numbers,” she added.

In May 2023, CBP announced changes to its phone app to expand the number of appointments available for asylum seekers.

However, a few months after the announcement, reports surfaced that cartels and smugglers had co-opted the app to speed up the process of bringing people and illicit goods into the United States.

In fiscal 2023, CBP recorded nearly 3.2 million illegal crossings nationwide, the highest annual total on record.