Joe Biden Faces Supreme Court Review of His 'Catch and Release' Policy

Neil MunroApril 2, 2022

President Joe Biden and border chief Alejandro Mayorkas are fuelling the migration wave into Americans’ jobs by ignoring the law that says migrants must be detained until their asylum cases are decided.

However, the Supreme Court will review the legality of Biden’s catch-and-release policy on April 26 in the Biden v. Texas lawsuit. The review will take place one month before Biden and Mayorkas lift the Title 42 barrier on May 23 and open the borders to an unlimited inflow of asylum-claiming migrants.

Federal law says any migrant on U.S. soil can apply for asylum. But the law also says: “Mandatory detention: Any alien subject to the procedures under this clause shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed.”

“The [federal] statute is very clear that aliens who show up at the border without documentation or a visa are supposed to be detained throughout their entire immigration court proceedings,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Non-U.S. nationals (aliens) apprehended by immigration authorities when attempting to unlawfully enter the United States … must be detained while awaiting removal,” the Congressional Research Service wrote on May 10, 2019.

But Mayorkas refuses to detain the migrants, despite the damage to Americans. Mayorkas also minimizes the use of the Migration Protection Protocols program, which effectively detains migrants in Mexico until their cases are complete.

Instead, he releases about 60,000 migrants each month into the United States under a variety of legal claims, as an additional 40,000 job-seeking migrants sneak across the border.

This catch-and-release policy allows the migrants to quickly get the jobs that they need to repay their debts to coyotes, cartels, and banks. So the policy fuels the cartels’ conveyor belt of labor and cash, and it allows people from many countries in Africa, South America, and Asia to fund their illegal entry into Americans’ labor and housing markets. The inflow of illegals skews the national economy in favor of investors, employers, and the coastal states.

Mayorkas is just one of numerous officials who have ignored the detention-until-completion law, according to the CRS report: “For many years, immigration authorities had construed governing statutes and regulations to … [ensure] alien could seek bond and potentially be released from custody during the pendency of those proceedings.”

The hands-off, no-enforcement policy was reversed by President Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, the CRS report notes:

On April 16, 2019 in [a legal directive titled] Matter of M-S-, however, Attorney General (AG) William Barr reversed this position, ruling instead that aliens apprehended between ports of entry and placed in formal removal proceedings following a credible fear determination remain ineligible for bond [and release].

Barr wrote:

In conclusion, the statutory text, the implementing regulations, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Rodriguez all lead to the same conclusion: that all aliens transferred from expedited to full proceedings after establishing a credible fear are ineligible for bond. [release].

Even pro-migration advocates concede the point. The American Immigration Council, for example, said on March 17, 2022:

The United States has broad authority to detain certain categories of immigrants, migrants, and others seeking humanitarian protection as their proceedings wind their way through the immigration legal system.

The detention law has been on the books since the 1996 reforms, said Law, adding:

It was the George W. Bush/Republican “Any Willing Worker” [policy] that was the beginning of just disregarding the mandatory detention provision. That let economic migrants loose into the interior of the country [supposedly to] show up to their court hearings. But as word got out that this is how the United States was treating migrants, more and more and more [migrants] came and overloaded the [asylum] system.

Trump tried to create a hard reset through [Migrant Protection Protocols] MPP and other deterrence and enforcement measures, but then Biden comes and just basically blows up the entire detention provisions of the [Immigration and Naturalization Act] INA.

The lower court judges in the Biden v. Texas case directed Biden’s deputies to either detain the migrants or keep them in Mexico until their asylum cases is resolved. So far, Mayorkas has sent only a few hundred migrants back to Mexico under MPP. In February, he released almost 73,480 migrants and sent just 93 back to Mexico under MPP.

Some GOP politicians recognize the government-backed labor migration hidden inside the overloaded asylum process.

“We are telling people ‘If you come to the border, and you claim asylum … You can come in,’” Sen. Bob Portman (R-PA) said on March 30. He continued:

By the way, there’s a 1.5 million person backlog for dealing with asylum claims — 1.5 million! This means that when you are allowed into the country to await an immigration judge looking at your case, there will be anywhere from four to six years before your case is considered. While you’re in the United States, … you’re working, your [illegal migrant] kids are going to school, you’re getting your health care, you’re part of the community.

And obviously a lot of these people don’t show up for their [asylum] court case. Some do, some don’t. But the point is this system is attracting people to the border.

Federal immigration law exists to protect the American right to a level playing field in the labor economy from unscrupulous employers, officials, and politicians — such as President George. W. Bush and his “Any Willing Worker” pitch.

Under 8 U.S. Code § 1324a, passed by Congress in 1952, employers are barred from hiring foreigners unless the foreigners have work permits:

(1) In general

It is unlawful for a person or other entity—

But three decades of legal and illegal migration has delivered roughly 45 million workers, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy. That imported population has delivered a colossal windfall to CEOs, investors, and Wall Street.

The mass inflow of legal and illegal immigrants has helped shift roughly $500 billion a year in wages from American employees to investors, according to data in the 2016 report on immigration by the National Academies of Science.

The white-collar visa programs have helped to shrink salaries for American tech graduates and nurses, and to inflate the stock value of Fortune 500 companies by $100 billion, according to migration advocates. Those programs have also helped the C-Suite in many Fortune 500 companies by pushing millions of outspoken American professionals out of tech careers, according to data in a 2021 study by the Census Bureau.

The migration programs have also shifted wages, investment, and wealth from interior cities and states — Detroit and West Virginia, for example — to the migration-inflated coasts.

The mass inflow of at least 20 million illegal migrant laborers has pushed many Americans into poverty. The March 22 report by the Oxfam anti-poverty group said: “more than 31.9 percent of the US labor force, or 51.9 million workers, currently make less than $15 per hour, and many are stuck at the federal minimum wage, which is less than half of that hourly rate.”

The damage was sketched out by the Washington Post‘s March 20 description of Dave Ramsey, in Lincoln Park, Mich.:

He’d modeled himself after his father, umpiring alongside him in high school and riding with him on private investigations to train as his apprentice. But if his father’s middle class ambitions had fallen apart after 50 years, Dave Jr.’s collapsed by the time he turned 20. He dropped out of school against his father’s advice so he could make some quick money laying cable, got injured at work and then got addicted to the prescription fentanyl patches. He’d gotten clean and stayed that way for the past nine years while taking care of his father and his daughters. He’d even gone back to school at night to earn his diploma, but the life available to him didn’t include the Masons, or a union job, or a thriving American middle class. Instead he’d hustled his way through a series of contracting jobs that paid a living wage one week and nothing the next, until the family’s monthly bills were so far beyond its means that Dave Sr. started burying them in the bottom of a box.

Coastal business groups are cheering the Title 42 takedown. A statement from the Zuckerberg-funded FWD.us advocacy group for West Coast investors said:

The goal should be a functional migration system broader than asylum. This requires expanding legal immigration avenues … Ending Title 42 is only one tiny piece of building that functional migration system,” said the group, whose wealthy founders gain more stock market wealth as the federal government extracts more workers, consumers, and renters for use in the U.S. economy.

But D.C. reporters are oblivious to the law and the economics, in part, because most are pressured by editors to focus on the migrants’ dramatic journeys.

In a call with Department of Homeland Security officials on Friday, agency officials invited questions from at least six favored reporters. But none of the reporters questioned the legality of releasing economic migrants into Americans’ labor market or the impact on Americans. Similarly, CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Mayorkas on April 1 and did not question the legality of Mayorkas’s open-borders policies.

Many polls show the public wants to like immigration and immigrants — but it also wants to prioritize fellow Americans.

For example, a March 18-21 poll of 1,050 registered voters by Echelon Insights reported that 29 percent of Americans strongly agreed that “America should not increase the number of immigrants it lets in, as immigrants could lower wages, take jobs away from Americans, and be a drain on taxpayers.”

Just 21 percent strongly agreed that “America should increase the number of immigrants it lets in, as immigrants will help address labor market shortages, start businesses, and revitalize declining cities and towns.”

The government’s operation of the nation’s immigration system is designed to deceive the public and the media about the large-scale extraction of workers and consumers from poor countries, Law said.

It’s always “Can you do just enough to deceive the public?” … Any removals that are done by the administration are simply [driven by] bad optics, such as the Haitians congregating under the [Del Rio] bridge, when they just can’t get away from the bad publicity. [Then they] say, “Oh, we’re not totally open borders, we’re using our limited resources to get the worst actors.”

The government’s cooperation with the cartels is hidden behind theatrical enforcement of borders laws and a curtain of legal complexity, he said:

They are partners in this business transaction of importing people and workers into the United States. This is this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where the cartels are being enriched by all these people who are paying the money for the transport, and the Biden administration willingly welcomes them, helps process them, and places them wherever they want to be the inside of the country …. So this is 100% a very corrupt business arrangement between the cartels and the Biden ministration.

But the Supreme Court case is exposing the hard-nosed reality of migration behind the border theater, said Law, adding “This is a seminal moment about whether or not we are a nation that has the ability to determine who comes into our country.”