Confirming Americans’ darkest suspicions, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted last week that “100 percent” of adults illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are being released into the country.
Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the Border Patrol merely acts as a checkpoint for so-called “family units” heading north.
In the last week alone, nearly 8,000 border crossers and illegal aliens were released into the country, including those not even requesting asylum.
McAleenan said adult migrants are given work permits allowing them to take American jobs while they await their immigration court hearings, oftentimes two years down the road.
Working or otherwise, the initial waves of migrants are inundating communities across the southwest. New Mexico is one of the hardest hit.
In Las Cruces, an hour north of the border city of El Paso, more than 6,500 migrants have been dropped off by the Border Patrol since mid-April. Deming, a town of 14,000, received 2,400 migrants, sheltering up to 700 at a time in the local fairgrounds.
At the capital in Santa Fe, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham offered to pay bus fare to send sojourners on to Denver. She also announced the state will offer grants to defray costs incurred by local governments.
“It is our duty as a state, in the absence of a comprehensive shift in strategy and personnel deployment on the part of the federal government, to accommodate and facilitate the needs of both these asylum seekers and the local communities where they are being released,” she wrote in a letter to Republican state lawmakers.
Lujan Grisham’s call to duty was a rich one. Earlier this year, the Democrat irresponsibly pulled National Guard troops back from the border and reposted a campaign video of her galloping through a thin wall of sheet rock in a mockery of President Trump’s call for a border barricade.
Some New Mexico counties don’t find the governor’s antics amusing and want nothing to do with illegal aliens. Local officials say the governor is only exacerbating the border chaos.
Sierra and Lincoln counties passed resolutions opposing any relocation of migrants to their rural communities. The moves followed a similar resolution by neighboring Otero County.
“As long as we continue to extend citizen benefits to unregistered aliens the flows will continue,” said Lincoln Commissioner Tom Stewart.
That logic apparently eludes the feckless Lujan Grisham as she and lawmakers in Washington do nothing about circumstance that leave U.S. immigration officials with few options other than to dispense free passes to border crashers and look the other way.