Fact Check: Biden Claims ‘I Will Not Separate [Migrant] Families’

CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed “I will not separate [migrant] families” during the migration section of his State of the Union speech.

VERDICT: FALSE. The Biden claim was meant to remind Democrats of their party’s emotional and media-magnified claim that President Donald Trump was deeply wrong to “separate [migrant] families” while he was trying to reduce illegal migration into Americans’ society.

But Biden’s immigration policy deliberately separates vast numbers of foreign families by allowing single workers to slip through the border while excluding the vast majority of their spouses and children, parents and siblings.

The Biden policy of migration-by-separation is extensive and deliberate because the D.C. establishment wants minimal media coverage about the huge harm of its two-track migration strategy that has been underway since at least 1986.

The official migration track is the legal migration system that imports 1 million legal immigrants each year, alongside another one million temporary workers.

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CBP/LOCAL NEWS X /TMX

The legal migrants can bring their immediate families, but most of the temporary workers — such as H-1B seasonal workers — must leave their families behind for several months. Many temporary workers refuse to go home at the end of their visas, further extending their family separation.

The unofficial track is the federal government’s decade-long tolerance for the illegal migrants who quietly flow into cities and towns around the nation.  The illegals perform similar tasks as legal migrants — they fill jobs, retail stores, and apartments, so creating vast profits for employers, vendors, and landlords.

But the vast majority of illegals are sneaked into the United States via dangerous pathways that require their separation from their families.

Their children and spouses are usually left behind because the migrants must be tough to survive the physical and sexual abuse from cartels, bandits, corrupt police, deserts, and distances.

In May 2021, Reuters described one of Biden’s imported workers, a Guatemalan migrant named Nicolas. Nicolas tried six times to sneak into the United States and each time was returned by Biden’s deputies to the five-yard line in Mexico — not to his home 2,000 miles away, according to Reuters:

“I thought, ‘I cannot return to Guatemala. I’m going to fight,” Nicolas said, remembering the promise to provide for his three children and wife. He had used her land as collateral to pay for the trip.

“If I go back to Guatemala… I’m going to lose everything.” Nicolas spoke on condition of only using his first name because he does not have legal status in the United States.

[…]

Nicolas now lives in Houston and picks up construction jobs outside a Home Depot store, helping him send parts of his $100-a -day wages back home. Every week, his wife makes deposits towards Nicolas’ [$10,000+ smuggling] debt.

Under Biden, for example, this unofficial pathway has carried roughly 2 million migrants past the unfinished border wall and his thin screen of border guards,

Biden’s government does not try to stop this flow of cellphone-carrying “gotaways” as they walk past the border wall, or even to penalize a useful share of the employers that hire the illegals instead of Americans.

Yet Biden’s deputies also boast of their electronic ears that can monitor cellphones around the world, their IRS inspectors who can track taxable money in secret, faraway bank accounts, and the federal agencies that arrest anonymous Capitol Hill rioters in suburbs around the nation.

There is little or no evidence that Biden’s deputies are trying to stop the illegal inflow. For example, Biden’s border chief tore down numerous legal and diplomatic barriers when he got the job in 2021, and he quickly directed his deputies to not arrest or deport the family-separated migrants who reach jobs and housing in American towns and cities.

But there are also many migration pathways that straddle the two official and unofficial migration tracks.

For example. Biden has welcomed 490,000 kids and teenagers via the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” program. This program is portrayed as a decent support for abandoned children who wash up at the border.

RELATED: Thousands of Migrants Processed in One U.S. Border Town in One Night

Brownsville PD via Storyful

However, the UAC program is a synchronized delivery service that is used by foreigners to have their children moved into the U.S. via a seamless chain of coyotes, cartels, U.S. border agents, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Roughly half of those child migrants are being delivered under contracts signed by illegal migrant parents who are living and working in the United States. The children were left behind — often for years — so the separated parents could sneak over the border, or work longer hours in the United States.

The other UAC migrants are youths who bravely separate from their families to earn some money in tough U.S. jobs. Their child labor jobs are sometimes dangerous, usually illegal, and would otherwise be worked by better-paid Americans and their high-tech workplace tools. But Biden’s regulators and his fellow progressives have largely ignored their growing child-labor economy and have even lost contact with at least 85,000 of these younger migrants.

Two-thirds of the non-UAC migrants that Biden’s deputies have registered since 2021 are “Single Adult” migrants. The agency data shows that 3.6 million “Single Adults” were registered compared to 1.8 million “family unit” migrants.  Many fewer than half of all the arrivals were sent home, but the agency does not provide data about their identity.

Similarly, Biden’s deputies created a new pathway for 360,000 migrants each year from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Nevada. This legally contested program claims to be legal because it uses a “parole” doorway that was only used for 5,700 emergencies per year under President Donald Trump and Barrack Obama. These migrants are supposed to stay for two years while their separated families stay in their home countries.

Many of Biden’s family separations last many years — but thousands are permanent because many migrants have died on their way to Biden’s welcome at the U.S. border.

Breitbart News tracks many of the deaths, partly because other media outlets prefer to ignore this inevitable cost of the federal government’s unofficial migration pathway.

For example, two migrants drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande into Texas from the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Breitbart News reported on March 6. Authorities in Mexico have recorded a total of 50 migrant deaths so far this year on the shared Coahuila-Texas border, the report noted.

In 2021 and 2022, very many migrants died in the Darien Gap jungle trail between Panama and Colombia.

“The stories we have heard from those who have crossed the Darien Gap attest to the horrors of this journey,” Giuseppe Loprete, the Panama manager for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a January 17 statement covered by Breitbart News. “Many have lost their lives or gone missing, while others come out of it with significant health issues, both physical and mental,” he added.

The statement linked to another U.N article which said “countless migrants have died in their quest to seek a better life.”

The national media is familiar with the family separations and the deaths and often mentions them in passing within larger stories. In December 2023, CNN reported:

Marcelly Giraldo, 33, a domestic worker from Medellín, Colombia, told CNN a lack of opportunity in her own country prompted her to seek a better life in the US. Her main motivation, she said, is a daughter she had to leave behind with a sister – a child she hopes to bring to the US once her asylum request has been approved.

Giraldo said she walked four days in the Panamanian jungle known as the Darien Gap, where she saw dead bodies. In Guatemala, she said she was forced to strip down by thieves.

“When I heard [Biden’s deputies] were giving (immigrants) the benefit of being allowed into the country, I decided to make the trip. Otherwise, I would have never done it. I would have never taken the risk,” Giraldo told CNN.

But this federal policy of migration-by-separation does not make headlines when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.

Breitbart News has a name for this ruthless two-track, family-separating, economic strategy: Extraction Migration.

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office reinforces the vast evidence that the federal policy shifts family wages and workplace investment toward Wall Street, real estate, coastal states, and government. The colonialism-like economic policy is very unpopular, in part, because it also diverts politicians’ focus away from American communities and the “deaths of despair” among discarded Americans.