The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit organization that advocates for stricter measures against illegal immigration into the U.S., issued a statement Tuesday denouncing President Joe Biden’s recent executive order aimed at curtailing the number of illegal border crossers receiving asylum.
The Biden administration’s executive actions, unveiled on Tuesday after months of the president claiming that he lacked the authority to act on the border crisis without Congress, will temporarily shut down asylum requests by migrants at the southern border once Border Patrol records 2,500 daily encounters on average over a seven-day period.
The suspension on asylum requests would only be lifted after the daily average is falls under 1,500 encounters, a number which the Biden administration deemed “low enough for America’s system to safely and effectively manage border operations.”
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A daily average of 2,500 encounters at the southern border would amount to over 900,000 annually, which would be well under the more than two million encounters in both fiscal years 2023 and 2022.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there have been over 1.5 million encounters with migrants at the southern border between legal ports of entry in fiscal year 2024 so far (Oct. 2023 – April 2024).
During remarks at the White House on Tuesday, President Biden said he is “moving past Republican obstruction and using the executive authorities available to me as president to do what I can on my own to address the border.”
“To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now,” Biden said. “The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.”
In their Tuesday statement, FAIR argued that Biden’s executive order is “riddled with loopholes” and “falls far short of what is needed to end the illegal immigration crisis his policies triggered.”
“This is yet another attempt by the administration to deceive the American public into believing that it is serious about securing our borders, halting mass illegal immigration and ending asylum abuse,” FAIR stated.
FAIR pointed to several exceptions in Biden’s executive actions, such as that the 2,500 daily cap of illegal aliens encountered at the border exempts migrants who enter the U.S. using the “CBP ONE” phone application and those who are flown into the country under the administration’s parole processes.
CBP has reported that since the introduction of the CBP One App program in January 2023, more than 591,000 migrants have scheduled appointments at ports of entry.
From January 2023 through the end of April 2024, CBP says 434,800 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants have arrived in the U.S. on commercial flights under the Biden administration’s parole programs.
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“The clear intent of today’s executive order is not to end mass illegal immigration and asylum abuse, but to make it less visible to the American public that is rightly alarmed by the administration’s open-borders policies that have resulted in some 10 million illegal entries since January 20, 2021,” FAIR President Dan Stein stated Tuesday.
“Contrary to the president’s claim, the order he signed will not shut down the border to illegal immigration or even slow it down in any meaningful way,” Stein continued. “President Biden has repeatedly challenged Congress to send a border and immigration enforcement bill to his desk to sign. Disingenuously, he has insisted on legislation that included massive amnesties for illegal aliens and loopholes that would render so-called enforcement provisions ineffective.”
FAIR also chided Biden for not reinstating executive actions on border security taken by former President Donald Trump, including the Remain in Mexico policy, which required certain migrants with pending asylum claims to remain in Mexico — a measure that Biden repealed in February 2021.
“Having finally acknowledged that we have an illegal immigration crisis on our hands, [Biden] should now challenge the leadership of his own party, which controls the Senate, to approve the House-passed H.R. 2, a bill that actually would secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws,” Stein concluded.
H.R. 2, or the “Secure the Border Act of 2023,” was passed by the House in May, and would resume construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, restrict asylum claims to only those migrants who arrive at a legal port of entry, and require U.S. employers to use an E-Verify system to check the employment eligibility of new hires.
