The number of global migrants at the border will keep rising unless President Joe Biden tightens border security, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) told the administration’s homeland security chief during a congressional hearing.
“Those Haitians … are going to keep coming, and others will keep coming,” Portman said at Tuesday’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended Biden’s lenient border policies.
“We got to figure out a way to discourage people from coming to our country by letting them know the border is not open,” Portman told Mayorkas.
Portman used a graph to illustrate the exponential increase in the number of global migrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border under President Biden’s watch.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, speaks to reporters after a luncheon with Senate Republicans at the Capitol in Washington, on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
A Breitbart News analysis of the latest Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehension confirms that the number of global migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through the southern border has risen dramatically since Biden’s inauguration.
Global migrants, also known as “extra-continentals,” refers to aliens from continents and regions far away from U.S. land borders, including the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Refugees walk through the departure terminal to a bus at Dulles International Airport after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 31, 2021, in Dulles, Virginia. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The estimated 15,000 Haitian migrants who gathered at a makeshift camp near the border in southern Texas are being released into U.S. communities without court dates “at a very, very large scale,” undercutting the Biden administration’s promises that they would face immediate removal, the Associated Press (AP) reported Wednesday.
Portman explicitly blamed Biden’s policy of granting Title 42 removal exceptions to unaccompanied children, many global migrants, certain families, and some adults deemed vulnerable for encouraging foreign nationals to make the journey to the U.S.
Migrants, many from Haiti, are seen at an encampment along the Del Rio International Bridge near the Rio Grande, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Invoked by former President Donald Trump’s administration in March 2020, the public health authority known as Title 42 allows U.S. border authorities to quickly deport any migrant amid the ongoing Chinese coronavirus pandemic, including asylum seekers. The Biden exceptions have weakened the measure.
Portman also questioned the effectiveness of the administration’s efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador at the center of its efforts to stem the record surge of migrants fueling the southern border crisis when there is a growing wave of migrants coming from elsewhere.
Customs and Border Patrol agents apprehend a group of Brazilian migrants who illegally crossed the border in Otay Mesa, California, on August 13, 2021. (Photo by SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Portman rhetorically asked Mayorkas, “So are we also going to have a program to stop the push factor in these other countries, including countries outside Latin America?”
The Biden administration may expand its efforts to address illegal migration’s “root causes” to countries across the Western Hemisphere. That move would still exclude countries on other continents.