President Joe Biden is issuing an executive order on Tuesday that permits about 2,500 migrant encounters at the United States-Mexico border before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can control the border — only between Ports of Entry.
Details regarding the order, issued by the DHS, show Biden taking cues from a failed Senate immigration deal that similarly permitted thousands of daily migrant encounters at the nation’s southern border before the DHS could control portions between Ports of Entry.
Most significantly, the order mandates that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas can only restrict such portions of the border after 2,500 migrants have been encountered over seven days. This is the equivalent of about 17,500 migrants arriving at the border each week — about a million migrants a year.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who served under former President Barack Obama, said in 2019 that daily migrant encounters hitting or exceeding 1,000 are considered crisis-level.
Border restrictions due to migrant encounters exceeding 2,500 for seven days on average means migrants crossing between Ports of Entry are ineligible to claim asylum. Mayorkas can start allowing migrants crossing between Ports of Entry to claim asylum again once average daily encounters have dropped below 1,500 over a week.
In practice, Mayorkas can allow asylum claims for migrants crossing between Ports of Entry about 14 days after restrictions are imposed.
Slipped into the order are a slew of exemptions for whom the order does not apply. For example, the order preserves Biden’s parole pipeline, which has funneled more than a million foreign nationals into the U.S. interior since January 2023.
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Randy Clark / Breitbart“Biden is about to officially legitimize crisis levels of illegal immigration through a variety of avenues (around 2 million a year) while gutting interior enforcement by refusing to arrest, detain, and deport illegal aliens in accordance with the law,” the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE) wrote of the order in a post.
Likewise, the order keeps in place the unaccompanied alien children (UAC) pipeline, in which the federal government resettles UACs who have arrived at the border across the U.S. with adult sponsors — the majority of whom are not their biological parents.
From Fiscal Year 2021 through Fiscal Year 2023, more than 370,000 UACs were transferred from the border to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for resettlement across American communities.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
