CLAIM: Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed during Thursday night’s presidential debate that border crossers freed into the United States show up to their asylum hearings.
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. A pilot program in 2019 by the federal government found that nearly 9-in-10 border crossers freed into the U.S. did not show up to their asylum hearing court dates.
“The Catch and Release … if in fact, you had a family that came across, they’re arrested, they were in fact given a date to show up for their hearing, they were released,” Biden said. “And guess what, they showed up for the hearing.”
A pilot program was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to test how many recent border crossers would show up to their asylum hearings after being released into the interior of the U.S.
The results found that about 87 percent of border crossers, or almost 9-in-10, recently released by DHS into the U.S. did not show up to their asylum hearings. With border crossers not showing up to their scheduled hearings, DHS officials said the agency is then forced to grapple with attempting to locate and deport each border crosser, an almost impossible task that strains federal resources.
The Trump administration has nearly ended the Catch and Release program by implementing the Remain in Mexico policy and by invoking a federal order that allows U.S. Border Patrol to instantly deport border crossers back to their native countries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.