Former President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, released nearly 90 percent of migrants arriving at the southern border into the United States with parole at the program’s peak, a federal watchdog reveals.
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the independent agency that works on behalf of Congress, reveals the extent to which Biden and Mayorkas carried out an expansive catch and release policy at the U.S.-Mexico border from early 2021 until Jan. 20, 2025.
In particular, the GAO report probed Biden and Mayorkas’s parole pipeline which was used to justify the release of millions of migrants into American communities. Prior to 2021, parole authority had been sparingly used by administrations.
With the implementation of so-called “humanitarian parole,” Biden and Mayorkas blew the lid off executive parole authority, the GAO report details.
“Specifically, our analysis showed that OFO and Border Patrol granted relatively few paroles during fiscal years 2019 and 2020,” the GAO report states:
During this time period the proportion of southwest border encounters resulting in parole ranged from about 3 percent to 28 percent. The number of paroles granted increased beginning in the summer of 2021 and peaked in December 2022, when 89 percent of encounters resulted in parole. Paroles granted declined substantially after December 2022 and again after January 2025.
In addition, the GAO report suggests that Biden and Mayorkas so overwhelmed the nation’s immigration enforcement system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents today are struggling to locate parole migrants.
“… without readily accessible information about noncitizens’ parole status, ICE does not have the information it needs to identify and monitor these noncitizens, or to take enforcement action, as appropriate,” the GAO report states.
Though the Biden administration is gone, some of its key players in its immigration agenda are back lobbying elected Democrats to commit to reimposing such border policies if they win back Congress in the midterms and the White House in 2028.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former DHS bureaucrat under Biden who also worked in the Obama administration and for a couple of years in President Donald Trump’s first term, recently received a glowing profile in The Seattle Times regarding her new podcast venture.
During her tenure under Biden, Trickler-McNulty sought to create a program that would see millions of illegal aliens merely check in annually to ICE agents, turning the nation’s borders into a European-style checkpoint. Most of those check-ins would not be in-person, but rather done electronically.
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