DHS Memo: Biden Admin Aware Its Policies Facilitate Border Crisis, Cartel Activity

An internal DHS memorandum indicates that the Biden administration is deliberately promoting immigration policies that profit transnational cartels and endanger the United States.

On Friday, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced that her office had obtained documents revealing Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas withheld the truth when he testified to the U.S. Congress in April that DHS was effectively managing the influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border. Back then, Mayorkas boasted that his department had put in place a “comprehensive plan” that prepares for and manages the current and anticipated increase in illegals pouring into the country. Mayorkas noted, among other things, that the DHS had “intensified efforts” to target and disrupt the activity of smuggling cartels and transnational criminal organizations “at the historic level.”

According to the official DHS memo released before the Mayorkas testimony, the fight against the cartels and international criminals was named one of the “pillars” of “border security” policy. It reads,

In April 2022, DHS and other federal agencies intensified our disruption efforts, marshalling the largest surge of resources and disruptive activities against human smuggling networks in recent memory. The immediate result has been over 2,500 arrests, investigations, and disruptions of smuggling infrastructure, such as buses and safe houses.

Why does the country need to marshal the “largest surge of resources and disruptive activities?” Apparently because the DHS is fully aware that the policies put in place by President Biden are encouraging mass migration and the criminal activity related to it.

An eight-page redacted document entitled “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Overview of the Southwest Border” describes the factors that influence the “irregular migration flow in the United States” and the role of the cartels and criminal groups that take advantage of it, and provides an assessment of current immigration protocols.

DHS acknowledges that “perceptions of favorable U.S. immigration policies,” along with economic and educational opportunities, are one of the major drivers of migration cited by illegals who come to the country.

The document shows that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and DHS officials know that the cartels are creating and exploiting the flow of migrants to bolster their profits:

We assess that smuggling networks are very active in promoting the flow of migrants through Mexico as drug trafficking organizations maintain control of the primary trafficking corridors into the United States. The drug trafficking organizations’ control of these corridors allows them to regulate the flow of migrants as well as charge migrants a ‘tax’ … for the right to pass through the corridors.

The document suggests that the lifting of the pandemic-related expulsion policy, formally known as Section 262 of U.S. Code Title 42, announced by the CDC on April 1 will lead to the “worst case scenarios.”

According to DHS estimates, as many as 18,000 illegal immigrants will be coming to America’s southern border every day as a result of the Title 42 reversal. That’s more than double the number of people the border agents are handling now. That would be 100,000 people per week, or half a million people potentially crossing each month.

While the immigration agencies “initiated contingency planning in anticipation of a potential surge of illegal migration,” the implementation of several recent Biden administration policies, namely “the pause in the use of removal pathways such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, Asylum Cooperation Agreements, and Prompt Asylum Claim Review,” along with rescinded Title 42, will obstruct CBP’s ability to expeditiously process and remove the illegals.

In addition to that, the CBP overview predicts that the policies will facilitate the activity of the cartels even more:

Transnational criminal organizations will exploit migration flows and entrench themselves in the smuggling cycle. TCOs endanger vulnerable individuals, amass illicit profits that feed cartel violence in Mexico and along the border, and create a volatile border environment.

The flow of illegal aliens into the country became increasingly diverse in 2020, notes the document. While 88 percent of all illegals encountered that year were from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection “has also seen an increase of migrants from other Latin American countries and the Caribbean, as well as Eastern Hemisphere countries such as Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Eritrea, and India.”

And, in the following year, the number of total encounters increased by 113 percent, according to the CBP.

“CBP encounters with illegal migrants at the U.S. southwest border totaled nearly 2.5 million since February 2021, with deportations down 70% last year,” recalled Moody.

“This is a shocking discovery. It contradicts what the Biden administration has been telling the American people and shows that the Mexican drug cartels are profiting off the mass migration of unvetted immigrants to fund an increase in violence at the border,” said the attorney general in the statement.

She added,

We are in the midst of a national opioid crisis and the deadliest drugs are being smuggled into our country from Mexico. President Biden knows this, yet he continues to double down on his terrible immigration policies knowing full well these policies are emboldening and enriching the very drug cartels who are profiting off the deaths of thousands of Americans.

On May 11, the CDC published data showing that drug overdoses in 2021 reached 107,622 cases, which is the highest number on record. Fentanyl and its components are produced in China, sold to the Mexican cartels, and then shuttled across the United States-Mexico border and into American communities. Reportedly, the amount of this deadly drug flowing across the southern border has quadrupled under President Joe Biden compared to two years prior, when former President Trump was in office.