Attorney General Merrick Garland Breaks with Kamala Harris, Refuses to Tell Migrants Not to Come to U.S.

Attorney General Merrick Garland broke with Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, refusing to tell migrants in Mexico and Central America not to come to the United States.

This week, during a visit to Guatemala, Harris told migrants “do not come” to the U.S.-Mexico border in the hopes of being released into the U.S. interior, though President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is continuing its massive Catch and Release operation.

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) asked Garland if he would echo Harris’s statement in telling migrants not to come to the U.S. Garland refused to make the remark multiple times.

The exchange went as follows:

HAGERTY: Just this week in Guatemala, Vice-President Harris sent a message to those that were perhaps contemplating coming to our country illegally: do not come. Is that a message that you can deliver, Attorney General, sitting right there, a message to these people, ‘do not come to our country?’

GARLAND: I think that Vice President Harris has been very deeply involved in the kind of law enforcement and other requirements that we’re looking to set up. She was instrumental in moving us to establish this joint task force to de-incentivize and to reduce traffic from the Northern Triangle countries, down through Mexico, into the United States. So there are a lot of different messaging kind of issues involved, and some of them involve getting at the root causes of why people are leaving in those countries.

HAGERTY: Well, messaging is one of these root causes, and I think it would be incredibly important to hear from our top law enforcement officer in America that these people should not come.

GARLAND: Well, I don’t want people to make that very difficult and dangerous trip with coyotes that you’re talking about. There’s no doubt about that this leads to human tragedy.

Garland’s unwillingness to tell migrants not to come to the U.S. is only one case in which the Biden administration’s gutting  interior immigration enforcement and dismantling a legal wall at the southern border has not matched Harris’s rhetoric.

Despite Harris’s statement, DHS is often apprehending border crossers before releasing them into the U.S. interior with no plans to deport them if they are found to have illegitimate asylum claims.

Specifically, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has set out a plan that tasks the federal government and United Nations-linked non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with releasing border crossers into the U.S. interior and providing them with one-year work permits to take American jobs.

As of the end of March, more than 45,000 border crossers were estimated to have been released into the U.S. interior by DHS. In addition to those releases, NGOs are finding migrants in Central America and Mexico to bring to the U.S.-Mexico border for release.

These releases are being quickly facilitated by DHS’s “CBP One” mobile app that allows migrants to input their information to confirm whether or not they are eligible for release into the U.S. interior.

The process often includes border crossers being put up in migrant hotels, paid for by American taxpayers, before getting bused and flown on domestic commercial flights into major U.S. cities.

From February 19 to April 22, as Breitbart News reported last month, the Biden administration had flown about 7,200 border crossers into the U.S. interior. Border crossers are allowed to bypass photo identification requirements, boarding flights without a photo ID, and do not have to prove they are negative for the Chinese coronavirus.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.