President Joe Biden’s administration is considering having non-governmental organizations (NGOs) find foreign nationals in Mexico to bring to the United States for admission, according to a report by BuzzFeed News.
The report states that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by Alejandro Mayorkas, is weighing whether to exempt certain foreign nationals in Mexico from the Center for Disease Control’s Title 42 order that allows federal immigration officials to quickly return border crossers to their native countries.
Specifically, NGOs would search Mexico for foreign nationals who fit into the so-called “humanitarian” exemption, who would otherwise have been returned via Title 42.
Those foreign nationals would be able to get processed by federal immigration officials and be released into the nation’s interior, along with tens of thousands of others who are being released into the U.S. interior.
BuzzFeed News reports:
The plan would have organizations in Mexico identify people who would likely gain an exception to the policy due to their vulnerability and get their biographical and biometric data to US Customs and Border Protection officials. This would allow for a more efficient process to screen and allow entry to certain immigrants who are tested for COVID-19, according to the documents. People who show up to ports of entry would not be able to enter this process. [Emphasis added]
…
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney suing the government over the policy, said that the ACLU has been able to send 35 cases a day to the government for entry into the US on humanitarian grounds. [Emphasis added]
“We are hoping to see a more formal, expanded program ramp up quickly. Any formal NGO process, to be meaningful, will need to allow a significant number of people in each day at multiple ports,” he said. [Emphasis added]
Already, the Biden administration is exempting border crossers from Title 42, allowing them to enter the U.S. interior. A lawsuit filed by Texas this month against DHS detailed how the administration has gutted Title 42 authority.
“… encounters of members of family units have spiked by roughly 1,147% between November 2020 and March 2021, yet the use of Title 42 for those aliens encountered has plummeted as a percentage of total encounters,” the lawsuit states.
DHS, for example: “only applied Title 42 to 47% of encounters of family units in February and 32% in March,” the lawsuit continues, noting that “case-by-case, individualized exceptions are neither case-by-case nor individualized when such exceptions applied to 53% of all encounters in February and 68% in March.”
As Breitbart News exclusively reported last month, top DHS officials have increasingly urged behind the scenes the phasing out of Title 42 authority, which House Republicans have said is the only border control left keeping a lid on an even larger surge of illegal immigration.
Democrats for months have asked Biden to stop using Title 42 and instead release all border crossers into the U.S., even without coronavirus tests, to spare foreign countries from the virus’s spread. This month, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) requested Biden end Title 42 use.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.