A deal to expand overall immigration to the United States, negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), comes as President Joe Biden oversaw a record number of illegal alien “got-aways” at the United States-Mexico border last year.
Schumer and Lankford are negotiating an immigration deal that would expand legal immigration to the U.S. by an additional 50,000 green cards annually, expedite work permits for illegal aliens released into the nation’s interior, and allow up to 35,000 illegal aliens to arrive at the border every week before imposing border controls, among other things.
The deal comes as Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has overseen record levels of illegal immigration in his first three years in office.
Most recently, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a bombshell report that suggested that about 860,000 illegal aliens are known to have successfully crossed the border, undeterred by Border Patrol agents in fiscal year 2023 — a record.
The figure indicates that illegal alien got-aways who entered the U.S. last year outnumber all illegal alien apprehensions at the border in fiscal year 2019.
“These ‘got-aways’ outnumber the combined populations of Kansas City and St. Louis, the two largest cities in Missouri,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas:
At the very least, you owe the American people full transparency into what your Department knows about illegal immigrants who have entered our nation without being stopped or tracked. [Emphasis added]
It is abundantly clear that the longer you remain in office, the worse the crisis at our southern border becomes. The yearly number of got-aways has increased dramatically under your watch, up from nearly 600,000 in fiscal year 2022 and more than double the 389,515 in fiscal year 2021. All told, nearly 2 million illegal immigrants have successfully evaded border officials during the Biden Administration. Furthermore, though your Department still has not yet released official numbers, border officials report that they encountered more than 300,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border last month—which would be an all-time high. These unprecedented figures underscore the need for you to be fully transparent about your Department’s own accounting of the southern border crisis. [Emphasis added]
Hawley is asking Mayorkas for a full accounting of illegal alien got-aways.
In total, the CBO report claims that Biden’s DHS has welcomed about 6.2 million illegal aliens to the U.S. since late January 2021. This is a foreign population far above annual U.S. births and more than twice the size of Chicago, Illinois.
“How many of those ‘got-aways’ are criminals, drug smugglers, or terrorists? By definition, there’s no way to know — until it’s too late,” Andrew R. Arthur writes for the Center for Immigration Studies.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
