President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is losing track of nearly two in ten border crossers released into the United States, a report from federal investigators suggests.
DHS Inspector General (IG) Joseph Cuffari issued his office’s audit of the agency’s massive Catch and Release network, through which officials are supposed to keep contact with the tens of thousands of border crossers they release into American communities every month.
According to the IG report, from March 2021 through August 2022, Biden’s DHS lost track of more than 177,000 border crossers released into the U.S. interior of the roughly 981,000 that were reviewed for the audit.
The report states:
U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) cannot always obtain and does not always record migrant addresses, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not always validate migrant addresses prior to migrant release into the United States. [Emphasis added]
Based on our review of 981,671 migrant records documented by USBP from March 2021 through August 2022, addresses for more than 177,000 migrant records were either missing, invalid for delivery, or not legitimate residential locations. [Emphasis added]
In addition to migrants not providing U.S. release addresses, DHS faced several challenges hindering its ability to record and validate migrant addresses as required. USBP did not accurately and effectively capture valid addresses, in part due to the large number of migrants apprehended, as well as its limited coordination with ICE and its limited authority to administer compliance with address requirements. ICE also did not have adequate resources to validate and analyze migrants’ post-release addresses. [Emphasis added]
The IG report suggests that Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is losing track of nearly 20 percent of all border crossers the agency is releasing into the U.S. interior. Some addresses recorded by DHS officials, where border crossers said they would be living, were restaurants, bus stops, car dealerships, and churches, among other invalid addresses.
DHS IG Report
Even in cases where border crossers provided legitimate addresses to DHS officials, the overwhelming majority, 80 percent, “were recorded at least twice during an 18-month period, some of which were provided by families upon release” while “more than 780 of these addresses were used more than 20 times.”
The IG report details:
These families provided addresses that may be unsafe or have overcrowded living conditions based on multiple migrants using the same address. For example, DHS released 7 families, comprising 12 adults and 17 children, to a single-family 3-bedroom New Jersey home in a 70-day period. [Emphasis added]
We also identified 7 addresses that were recorded more than 500 times, some of which were other Federal agency locations and charities. USBP agents may input charity addresses. However, charities only serve as temporary residences, not migrants’ final destinations. Based on our analysis of USBP release data from March 2021 through August 2022, we identified at least 8,600 migrant release addresses associated with 25 charities. In these situations, migrants must update any address changes once they reach their final destination in the United States. [Emphasis added]
The sheer volume of border crossers released into the U.S. interior under Biden’s watch is record-breaking by all metrics.
The latest figures indicate that at least five million border crossers and illegal aliens have been welcomed into the U.S. interior since Biden took office — a foreign population that exceeds the size of half of all the states.
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Randy Clark / BreitbartJohn Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
