Biden Officials Tell Texas Judge: We Want More Poor Migrants

President Joe Biden’s deputies asked a judge to suspend his enforcement of the nation’s immigration law, saying they want to extract more migrants from Mexico and Central America.

The Texas-based federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, responded the next day, August 17, with “Denied.”

The legal exchanges started on August 13, when the judge gave the federal government seven days to detain all new migrants or send them back to Mexico under President Donald Trump”s Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) rules.

On August 16, the administration asked the judge to delay his seven-day rule, pending the eventual outcome of appeals by government lawyers.

The Biden administration wants to “strengthen legal pathways for those who choose to or must migrate,” said one August 16 legal response by Ricardo Zuniga, a state department official now overseeing Central American issues. To achieve that goal, Zuniga said:

The United States must establish long-term strategic partnerships with the governments in the region to catalyze structural change … [and create] a comprehensive policy framework to address regional migration that includes adequate protection, expanded legal pathways, and regional solutions.

[If the judgement is upheld] regional partners and international organizations will be less inclined to cooperate with the U.S. in implementing its broader long-term foreign policy goals, including the Root Causes Strategy and the Collaborative Migration Management Strategy.

On July 30, Breitbart News described the Collaborative Migration Management Strategy. The policy seeks to extract workers and consumers from poor countries via a series of regulation-created migration routes, regardless of Congress’ immigration law.

The August 16 filing came in response to Kacsmaryk’s ruling on August 13. The judge ruled:

By ignoring its own previous assessment on the importance of deterring meritless asylum applications without “a reasoned analysis for the change [ending MPP],” Defendants acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

Kacsmaryk also directed officials to comply with the law requiring the detention of migrants until they win their asylum claims:

Accordingly, Section 1225 provides the government two options vis-à-vis aliens seeking asylum: (1) mandatory detention; or (2) return to a contiguous territory. Failing to detain or return aliens pending their immigration proceedings violates Section 1225.

Without MPP, Defendants only remaining option under Section 1225 is mandatory detention. But DHS admits it does not have the capacity to meet its detention obligations under Section 1225 because of “resource constraints.”

Under these particular circumstances, where Defendants cannot meet their detention obligations, terminating MPP necessarily leads to the systemic violation of Section 1225 as aliens are released into the United States because Defendants are unable to detain them.

The federal’s government’s post-2009 refusal to comply with the detention rule has caused a massive inflow of illegal migrants into Americans’ labor and housing markets.

This massive inflow has effectively stolen much wealth from working Americans by delivering at least 2 million wage-cutting migrant workers to employers and investors located mostly in the wealthy coastal states.

“If DHS doesn’t detain aliens who enter illegally, more aliens will enter illegally,” said an August 18 statement from the Center for Immigration Studies:

Want proof? Up until December 2009, DHS complied with the congressional detention mandate. That month, then-ICE Director John Morton issued a directive that aliens who had received a positive credible fear assessment [from a border officer] should generally be released on parole.

Asylum officers completed 5,173 credible fear cases in FY 2009, before the Morton parole directive went into effect. Those completions grew to 8,926 in FY 2010, 11,716 in FY 2011, and 13,607 in FY 2012, before increasing by almost 280 percent, to 36,454, in FY 2013.

By FY 2019, [Asylum Officers] AOs were adjudicating more than 102,000 credible fear claims, after receiving more than 105,000, as smugglers discovered and exploited the “credible fear” loophole that allowed illegal migrants to live and work in the United States indefinitely.

On August 16, the administration asked the judge to lift his seven-day requirement, saying the government no longer has the ability, or diplomatic arrangements, to detain the record flood of migrants:

The Court’s injunction undermines the Executive Branch’s constitutional and statutory authority to enforce the immigration laws and set immigration priorities. The injunction also imposes deadlines that Defendants cannot meet on their own, because any plan to re-implement the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) would necessarily require close cooperation with the Government of Mexico … the court’s order threatens significant disruption to the United States’ relationship with Mexico and Central American nations.

The federal government policy of extraction migration pulls many workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy.

The economic policy inflates the labor supply and boosts consumer spending, so aiding companies and investors. Except for 2019 and 2020, the policy has been underway for decades, even as the government underfunded its partial defense of the border.

Migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.

The case is Texas v. Biden, No. 2:21-cv-00067-Z in District Court for the Northern District of Texas.