Thousands of Migrants Exempt From Biden’s Border Order

(Qian Weizhong/AP)

Tens of thousands of migrants could be exempt from President Joe Biden’s new executive order aimed at stemming the flow of illegal immigrants flowing through the southern border, if their home countries refuse to take them back, the New York Post reported Thursday.

The Post cited a federal memo saying that illegal immigrants who aren’t allowed to return to their home countries will not count against the 2,500 daily threshold that would shut down the border.

Cases in point are China and Venezuela. The latter stopped accepting deportation flights from the U.S. in February and China is “hit or miss” with travel documents, according to the Post. More than 150,000 migrants from those two countries alone have crossed into the U.S. illegally in fiscal year 2024, and Biden’s new executive order would continue to allow hundreds of Venezuelans and Chinese to pour through the border every day.

“It’s all bull***t,” a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told the Post of Biden’s new order.

According to the memo, the Post reported that “single adults and family units who are very hard to remove (such as countries which do not permit charter repatriation flights) … may be considered for processing of Expedited Removal or placed into section 240 removal proceedings.”

In layman’s terms, Section 240 means illegal immigrants who can’t return home are released into the U.S., just as they were before Biden’s order, according to the report.

“They [migrants who can’t be deported] are not included in that 2,500 number; the language was ambiguous for a reason,” the DHS official told the Post.

In addition to China and Venezuela, Cambodia, Cuba, Eritrea, India, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Pakistan, and Russia also refused deportations from the U.S. as of 2020, the Post reported.

In fiscal year 2023, 24,000 Chinese migrants illegally entered the U.S. and 285 were sent back. Illegal Venezuelan migrants surpassed 200,000 in 2023 and 124,000 have been arrested so far in fiscal year 2024, with 1,500 being deported through Mexico, according to the report.

Also among the exceptions are illegal immigrants who say they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home country, according to the Post. One agent told the Post that illegal immigrants ditch their identification, making that assertion difficult to qualify.

Republicans have slammed Biden’s order as being an election-year sham, with former President Donald Trump telling Newsmax it’s a “public relations executive order.”

“First of all, it’s a nothing that he did and allowing massive numbers of people still to come in, and it’s just misinformation, disinformation, and just another hit job,” Trump told Newsmax on Tuesday.

Biden’s own federal agents know it, too.

“It’s way too little too late. He’s trying to act tough on the border, but we know he’s been the most open border administration ever,” one agent told the Post.