A Biden-Harris administration program meant to deport families who entered the United States illegally has instead allowed nearly 90 percent of the migrants to remain in the country.
More than 22,000 of the 24,000 migrants placed in the Family Expedited Removal Program were allowed to stay in the United States, with only around 2,600 deported so far and thousands more having fled the program, according to a New York Post report on Tuesday. Border Patrol agents have apprehended over 842,000 migrants at the southern border since the Biden-Harris administration introduced the program in May 2023.
The report comes as Vice President Kamala Harris faces intense backlash over her failure as "border czar" to secure the southern border. More than 7.8 million migrants, including nearly 100 individuals on the terrorist watch list, have crossed into the United States illegally under the Biden-Harris administration.
Half a dozen House Democrats in late July joined their Republican colleagues in approving a resolution that condemned Harris for her catastrophic mismanagement at the border, while more than a dozen Border Patrol agents recently expressed their concerns that a Harris presidency would "continue the same failed policies as Biden" and even exacerbate the border crisis.
"These numbers are further proof that the Biden-Harris administration’s policies have nothing to do with actually securing the border or enforcing the law, but instead masking its utter refusal to do either of those things," Mark Green (R., Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Tuesday in a statement.
The Biden-Harris administration implemented the deportation program to instill "consequences for unlawful entry to the United States" following the end of Title 42—a public health law that former president Donald Trump introduced to prevent the spread of the coronavirus by quickly expelling illegal migrants at the border. The program was designed to help keep family units together during the deportation process but major loopholes allowed the majority of migrants to stay.
"Such a dismal rate of removals makes clear that President Biden, ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris, and now-impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are committed to ignoring U.S. immigration law, while attempting to hide that fact from the American people," Green said.