President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is presumably releasing Chinese nationals, who may or may not have espionage ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), into the United States after they arrive at the southern border, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) charges.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Cornyn detailed the Biden administration’s expansive Catch and Release network whereby migrants cross the border, are briefly detained, and are released directly into the U.S. interior as they wait, sometimes years, to go before a federal immigration judge.
A component of Biden’s Catch and Release network, the process known as parole, was recently shut down, at least temporarily, by a federal judge. Parole has allowed hundreds of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens into the U.S. interior since Biden took office.
From February 2021 to January 2023, Biden’s DHS released an estimated 1.7 million border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities — exceeding the population of Phoenix, Arizona. Among those, Cornyn said, are Chinese nationals whom the federal government knows little about.
“Recently I was in El Paso … the Border Patrol detained two young men who had passports from … mainland China, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” Cornyn told DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas:
They were presumably released, like these other individuals, into the interior of the United States with a Notice to Appear or a Notice to Report. [Emphasis added]
…
They show up with a passport and claim a credible fear of persecution and under your’s and the Biden administration’s policy, they are released into the interior of the country. These are people who we, perhaps, do not have any records about. Certainly, we’re not going to get them from China. You know zero about them and zero about the threat they pose to the United States and our national security. You can’t tell us, can you, where the individuals are located who have been either paroled or released into the United States? You have no comprehensive list or ability to identify where those people are today, do you? [Emphasis added]
Though Cornyn asked Mayorkas for specifics on whether the agency knows the whereabouts or complete backgrounds of those released into the U.S. interior, he did not ask the top official for the latest total of just how many this Catch and Release population now includes.
DHS officials are not required to publish the figure to the public nor are they required to report the figure to Congress.
According to the most recently available totals, the Biden administration has welcomed almost three million border crossers and illegal aliens into the U.S. interior. This includes those 1.7 million who were directly released into American communities and another 1.2 million who are known to have successfully crossed the border undetected.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.