DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Cuts ‘New Mother’ Loophole in Immigration Law

President Joe Biden’s border chief announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would not detain pregnant and lactating illegal migrants, widening the official effort to abolish ICE enforcement of U.S. immigration law.

Alejandro Mayorkas’s deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) loudly announced the exemption from deportation laws in a Friday statement, which received uncritical coverage from establishment media:

We will not detain individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist. This reflects our commitment to treat all individuals with respect and dignity.

The policy formally applies to ICE, but “it’s going to be applied across the board [and at the border] because that’s the way this operates,” in Mayorkas’ pro-migration DHS, said Robert Law, who was chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency under President Donald Trump.

“The law requires the detention of adults with pending immigration hearings … So this just creates a carve-out” in the law for more migrants to exploit, said Law, who is the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. He told Breitbart News:

The illegal alien population is incredibly rational — they respond to incentives and signals coming out of the administration … every time they [say] “We’re not going to apply the law to this type of population,” all of a sudden that that type of [migrant] population just surges.

For example, after 2010, young migrants started surging through the doorway the 2008 law for “Unaccompanied Alien Children” created. Officials still have no test to verify if a youth migrant has turned 18, so they also admit adult migrants who plausibly claim they are 17 or younger.

In 2019, mothers with children surged through the doorway created by Judge Dolly Gee’s unilateral 2015 expansion of the Flores settlement, Law said. In April, for example, one migrant told a reporter in the United States that he used his 3-year-old-son to get through the Flores doorway; “I had [to] use him like a passport to get here … I am here because of him.”

Once this “new mother” ICE exemption takes effect, rational migrants will claim they are pregnant and dare enforcement officers to conduct pregnancy checks, Law said:

Do you really think that when someone who’s not showing [weight gain] makes that pregnancy claim, [the officers] are going to bring them down to the hospital facility to have a test? No, they’re just going to say “Uh, okay.”

The exemption is open to women with babies that are one year old or even older, and it adds to the rules which direct ICE officers to only enforce immigration laws against violent criminals in the United States.

The announcement was top news at the Spanish-language TV station, Telemundo: “ICE avoids arresting and deporting pregnant women and nursing mothers: Biden overturns a measure introduced by Trump that allowed the deportation of thousands of immigrants and further extends restrictions on federal agents.”

The pregnancy rule will also encourage job-seeking men to enter the United States because it reassures them — and their dollar-counting coyotes — that they can get their pregnant or lactating wives into the United States, he said, adding:

The men just have to hike through the desert or swim across the waterway. Once done, congratulations, you can now raise your family in the United States with no legal channels to be here. We’ve welcomed you in and therefore you’ll take advantage of all over the generosity of this administration and the taxpayer dollars that will basically prop up their [lower income] lives.

Todd Bensman, another expert with the Center for Immigration Studies, reported July 6 from Costa Rica, that migrants are carefully using pregnancies to enter and stay in the United States:

CIS observed many of the Haitian women on the smuggling trail in Costa Rica were in advanced stages of pregnancy, often seven months.

Haitian national Peter Thesaus, 25, who was traveling with a wife and Brazilian-born child to join a relative in Florida, said his 6-month pregnant sister is on the way from Brazil further south. He and his extended family had been living and working comfortably and securely for six years in Brazil, on his job with a local hospital, until Biden’s election prompted his departure.

He admitted that his pregnant sister’s trip was carefully timed so that the child would be born an American. That would help the child qualify for a variety of welfare benefits, of course, but also help anchor the rest of the family and dissuade family-separating deportation.

Officials are allowing more migrants with children to come through the border, despite the official insistence that the border is closed.

The administration — likely Mayorkas — chose to announce the policy to the national media because it wants to advertise the new policy to potential migrants across Central and South America, Law said. He added:

If you want to have that policy in place, you can do so just through guidance to your field officers and that typically doesn’t become public. But you announce this through media channel when you want the word to get out that “If you fall within this new classification, now is your time. Come quickly.”

The goal of announcing it is to entice the movement of those populations. They are the next favorite category that they actually want permanently resettled in the United States, even though they have no permanent legal channel to do so.

For many years, the federal government has operated an unofficial policy of extracting migrants from poor countries to spike the U.S. economy and Wall Street via a brutal Hunger Games obstacle course of cartels, deserts, mountains, and border officers.

That covert policy of inflating the labor supply damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture. But it boosts Wall Street’s values.

The DHS press release announcing the new doorway uses the language pushed by Mark Zuckerberg’s network of pro-migration activists: “Biden Administration further illustrates commitment to building a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system.”

Republicans can try to shut the exemption with lawsuits and actions in Congress, Law said. “I think the states are going to have the best likelihood to have standing [to sue],” he said because their state residents will have to pay for the birth and support of children poor migrants import.

Republicans can also fight back in Congress, despite their minority status, because the federal law and public opinion are on their side, he asserted:

They should be throwing as many amendments into the [appropriations] process as possible … You’ve got to fight … If you fail to file these types of amendments, then you’re giving them a pass. If you give them a pass, they feel emboldened and then they’ll take the next step and it will just lead to the further dissolution of our immigration laws and we will have a system that arbitrarily operates based on the whims of the Biden administration.

The nation’s migration system was drafted to help Americans compete for wages in their national labor market, to compete for decent housing in their national housing market, and to gradually improve their society via their citizen-only elections. But Biden’s progressive deputies are hostile to Americans’ use of borders to help govern their society, said Law.

Mayorkas “is completely hostile to Americans, particularly hard-working, blue-collar, working Americans … there’s never been someone with such a level of corruption, disdain for the law, and refusal to adhere to the mission of the department as Mayorkas,” Law said.

For example, on June 9, Mayorkas announced that he is putting the “dignity” of migrants — not of Americans — “foremost in our efforts.”

On the same day, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that 92,000 Americans died of drugs in 2020 amid unemployment, poverty, and alienation, which is spiked by the migration invited by the Cuban-born Mayorkas.

While Mayorkas puts his “foremost” efforts towards the dignity of migrants, the Associated Press reported June 24 on the continued loss of dignity by some non-immigrant Americans:

ST. LOUIS (AP) — She screamed and cried, banged on the dashboard, begging her husband to drive faster, faster, faster toward her brother lying face-down on his bedroom floor.

Craig Elazer had struggled all his life with anxiety so bad his whole body would shake. But because he was Black, he was seen as unruly, she said, not as a person who needed help. Elazer, 56, had started taking drugs to numb his nerves before he was old enough to drive a car.

Now his sister, Michelle Branch, was speeding toward his apartment in an impoverished, predominantly Black neighborhood in north St. Louis. His family had dreaded the day he would die of an overdose for so long that his mother had paid for his funeral in monthly installments.

…

She was hysterical by the time she arrived at his apartment. The cousin who found him said he was sorry; Elazer had been alone and dead for hours. They tried to convince her not to go inside, but she wanted to see him.

The established media uncritically covered the new exemption. The New York Times reported:

Under the new policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers generally will not detain or arrest people who are pregnant or nursing, or who had a baby within the previous year, according to a draft of the plan shared with The New York Times and a person familiar with the policy. The language in the policy will be gender neutral, acknowledging that transgender men can give birth — another departure from past directives.

Potential migrants will not be able to recognize the life-changing opportunities of the new exemption, according to New York Times reporter Eileen Sullivan. “The new policy will affect only a small number of immigrants.”

The Washington Post said:

Thirteen pregnant women were in ICE custody as of Thursday, and they are being considered for release under the new policy, officials said.

Biden’s DHS has revived the pre-Trump economic strategy of extracting workers, consumers, and renters from other countries for use in the U.S economy. The consumers, renters, and workers are being pulled through the border by DHS officials who are widening a series of small side doors in immigration law.

For example, when illegal migrants are caught near the border, Mayorkas uses his legal authority to send them back to the five-yard line in Mexico instead of flying them 2,000 miles back to Central America.

He is helping economic migrants get jobs by letting them file for political asylum in the United States. He is helping teenage economic migrants walk into jobs via a side door created in 2008 law for victimized children. He is helping older migrants stay in the United States by letting them use the same 2008 law — and refugee rules — to pull their left-behind children up into the United States.

Mayorkas is also using his parole power to invite lawfully deported migrants to rejoin their left-behind migrant children who are applying for asylum. He is using the U Visa program to provide work permits and Social Security Numbers to migrants who say they were victimized by a crime in the United States.

On June 16, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new asylum rules that will offer citizenship to people who claim they are persecuted by abuse from their spouses.

In April and May, for example, Mayorkas let roughly 170,000 working-age migrants through the U.S.-Mexico border, just as companies complain that they must pay higher wages to Americans.