The Biden administration is flying migrants into the US “so that the border doesn’t look as out of control,” the head of the Border Patrol union tells The Post in an exclusive interview — adding that he expects an “amnesty program in the future” to accommodate the millions who have come into the country since the president took office in January 2021.
“It’s just a bait and switch,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said on the phone from Texas. “They’re just paroling people in through airports rather than having them come across the border.”
“They’re just gonna keep the numbers at around 5,000 [border crossings per day], parole people in and say, ‘Oh, look, we cut our numbers down,’” Judd added, saying even that figure was an “astronomical high” compared with the Donald Trump and Barack Obama administrations.
“We’re still five times higher than what we should be,” he went on, “but lower than those record number of apprehensions at the southern border.”
The Biden administration announced a program in January 2023 to allow thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to enter the country through a legal entry program known as “humanitarian parole.”
Since then, more than 386,000 migrants have flown into the US, so long as they had a sponsor and submitted to a background check — unlike the upwards of 85% of migrants who are routinely released into the country after crossing the border on foot.
Monthly crossings at the Mexico frontier set a new record in February, as 189,922 were apprehended — an average of more than 6,500 per day.
Obama’s former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a 2019 interview on MSNBC that just 1,000 illegal border crossings per day “overwhelms the system.”
The crossing numbers do not necessarily include parolees who can enter the US directly on commercial flights and may stay up to two years in the country “based on urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.”
The parolees are processed via CBP One, a cell phone app that also assists a family reunification program open to Colombian, Cuban, Ecuadorian, El Salvadorian, Guatemalan, Haitian and Honduran nationals.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced in January that “approximately 413,300 individuals have successfully scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry using CBP One.”
Congressional Republicans have called on Biden to “terminate” the flights and GOP-run states have sued to stop the program, arguing that it abuses a tool meant to be used only on a case-by-case basis.
A Texas federal court, however, dismissed the lawsuit on March 8, allowing the administration to continue granting parole status to 30,000 migrants each month.
House Republicans also impeached Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, last month for failing to enforce federal immigration law and lying to Congress by saying the US border was “secure.”
Officials in border states say the Biden administration’s immigration policies have hampered efforts to control the influx of asylum seekers, even as those authorities have spent billions of dollars to maintain order in their communities.
“Texas as a state government is spending billions of dollars,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told The Post as she visited Eagle Pass on Tuesday.
“And then you’ve got the counties that are spending millions of dollars, and then, of course, the individual ranchers, farmers and private property owners are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect their property.”
Local authorities told Blackburn they have requested more sections of a southern border wall to be built for decades, but Judd said the administration has “to have policy that accompanies infrastructure.”
“You can go after the gotaways, you can go after the cartels, but you can’t stop asylum seekers. If you can’t stop asylum seekers, there’s just not gonna be any border agents in the field because we’re all gonna be doing administrative duties,” he said. “So they have to go hand in hand.”
Judd suggested that holding single adults in custody and speeding up a backlog of millions of asylum court cases through a “first-in, last-out” policy would lessen the incentives for migrants to cross — and for Mexican cartels to traffic them.
But Judd added he doesn’t expect the administration to make “drastic changes,” especially after Biden said he had done everything in his authority and demanded Congress pass a bipartisan Senate border bill instead.
“There are a lot of things that he can do administratively, he just refuses to do it because, if he does it, he’s gonna prove that he was basically a liar,” Judd said. “Everything was about a legal pathway for those people that already violated our laws.”
That will inevitably lead to an “amnesty program in the future,” according to Judd, that will accommodate the roughly 8 million illegal migrants that will be living in the US by the end of fiscal year 2024.
“All you’re doing is inviting more people to come because they then see, ‘OK, well, all I gotta do is get here, stay here for 10 years and I’m gonna have a legal pathway down the road as well,’” he said. “It doesn’t work.”
The Biden administration has floated green card handouts for up to 4,000 migrants per year if they have resided in the US for a decade, not been convicted of “serious crimes” and “would suffer exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” if deported.
Shortly after taking office, the president also called on Congress to pass a “comprehensive” immigration reform bill that would open pathways to permanent US residency and citizenship for up to 11 million migrants.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.