“We literally apprehend immigrants from China. Do you think we are getting what their background is before we release them? Of course we’re not,” Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), told journalists during a Feb. 9 press conference.
“So not only do we have more than 1.2 million known ‘gotaways,’ and by the way, if you ask border patrol agents, they will tell you we really have no idea how many there really are and it could easily be double that. But we are also knowingly releasing people into the U.S., knowing that we have not done a full-vetted background on [them], in violation of the law.”
The same data show 17,298 encounters with Russian individuals during the first three months of the fiscal year, and 26,333 for the three prior years. Russia and China have grown increasingly close in recent years, cooperating in joint military maneuvers, in opposing the United States, and on economic matters.
In addition to thousands of Chinese and Russians coming into the country through Mexico without background checks, at least 140 individuals on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist have been detained by U.S. immigration officials since Biden took office, more than were detained during the four years under his predecessor in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, according to Tom Homan, former acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
In addition to “individuals from countries that are major U.S. adversaries,” Morgan separately told The Epoch Times that “what should terrify everyone is Border Patrol has encountered individuals from more than 170 countries during this crisis, and they are simply unable to fully and properly vet them all before being released into the U.S.”
“And think about the 1.2 million gotaways since Biden took office—how many potential national security and public safety threats from countries across the globe have been among them? We simply do not know. The cartels certainly don’t care who they’re smuggling across, as long as they make money doing it,” he added.
Morgan and Homan are visiting fellows for the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank’s Border Security and Immigration Center. They were joined during the press conference by Lora Ries, director of the center, who’s a former acting deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
All three of the former security and immigration officials were highly critical of Mayorkas. Ries said the DHS chief should be impeached “and disqualified from any further federal office.”
The border security issue is directly related to China’s campaigns against the United States, according to Republicans and foreign policy experts, because Beijing provides the precursor chemicals used by the Mexican drug cartels to make fentanyl, with which they’re flooding the United States and making untold billions of dollars in the process.
The three House Republicans are Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Tony Gonzalez of Texas, and Maria Salazar of Florida. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed to their insistence that H.R. 29 be considered under regular order rather than the much quicker process of bringing a legislative proposal to the floor under a suspension of rules.
Morgan said House Republicans had two years prior to the 118th Congress to debate and settle on the provisions of H.R. 29.
“So, committee hearings? What do you need, a day and a half ... so what’s there to discuss on this bill?”
Bacon told The Epoch Times separately through a spokesman that his “primary goal is to have this bill go through committee and regular order, so that all members of the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees can review and improve it as needed.”
“The same group of people who want this to bypass regular order are the ones who demanded regular order for all bills during the speaker’s votes in early January. They should follow the rules they demanded. Rules for thee and not for me doesn’t work for the good order of the House.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not return a request for comment by press time.