WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) Senior Counsel Andrew Block will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Biden Administration.
In his testimony, Mr. Block will highlight the abuses of authority that occurred on President Biden’s watch in the area of immigration policy and how those efforts wasted federal resources and undercut American security.
Watch the hearing live here at 2 p.m. ET.
Read the written testimony here.
Remarks as prepared for delivery are below:
Chairman Brecheen, Ranking Member Thanedar, and Members of the Subcommittee: Thank you for inviting me to testify on the Biden Administration’s Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the Department of Homeland Security. We at America First Legal have spent the last four years educating the American public on this topic, so I am honored to share some of our results with you.
The Biden Administration’s cavalier attitude toward the law was on full display in the way it approached immigration policy where, at President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas’ direction, DHS failed to faithfully execute the laws and even actively created barriers to law enforcement.
Among the Administration’s many abuses, none is worse, in my view, than its abuse of Parole Authority. Congress empowered the Executive Branch to use its discretion, in compelling exigent circumstances and on a case-by-case basis, to temporarily admit otherwise inadmissible aliens, when doing so is necessary for an urgent humanitarian reason or a significant public benefit.
Yet, from this limited, qualified, and individualized authority of last resort, the Biden Administration created whole “programs,” completely disregarding all the constraints imposed by Congress and using it as a primary authority to indiscriminately admit millions of people.
One of these programs was the CBP One app. Now, when you or I arrive at a port of entry, we have to show the officer our documents, whether it’s a passport, license, visa, or some paperwork showing that we’re allowed to enter the country. But with CBP One, the last Administration said, “forget all that,” and illegal aliens, lacking any basis under law to come into the U.S., were allowed to make an appointment, show up at a port of entry, and walk on in. It wasn’t even catch and release — it was literally show up and get released.
According to Secretary Noem, more than one million people entered the country illegally this way, walking through the front door. AFL applauds DHS’s announcement yesterday that they are going to repurpose this app for their removal efforts.
Other parole programs, which I touch on in more detail in my written testimony, are the CHNV, a program so rife with fraud that the Administration actually paused it on its own for 27 days, and Parole in Place. Parole in Place was particularly egregious, and AFL took the Administration to court and won, stopping this program in its tracks.
Through these three “programs,” the last Administration attempted to bestow legal status on 2.6 million illegal aliens. For context, that is more than the population of 15 U.S. states and the equivalent of the population of the United States’ third-largest city of Chicago.
Now, where even the Biden Administration could not straight-face a legal argument under existing law, it simply endeavored to re-write it. One such example is the 2022 “Asylum Officer Rule,” which would have given USCIS Asylum officers the duties of Immigration judges. When the Rule came out, AFL Founder and President Stephen Miller called it “the most extreme immigration regulation ever proposed.”
Again, AFL sued to prevent the rule from taking effect, but it is yet another example of how the Administration focused its resources on subverting the law rather than enforcing it.
Last is the issue of Interior Enforcement. And while removals were statistically non-existent during the Biden Administration, its attitude towards ICE was even more pernicious than that
Under the Biden Administration, DHS implemented policies that proactively made it harder for ICE agents to take routine enforcement actions against the worst of the worst. Under the ironically named “priorities memo,” for example, DHS required ICE agents to seek pre-approval from Washington, D.C. headquarters for every proposed enforcement action for almost all of 2021.
Records obtained by AFL show how ridiculous the policy was, resulting in nearly 60,000 requests by field agents simply to do their job. This is 60,000 enforcement actions against gang and cartel members, murders, arsonists, traffickers, and violent people that were slowed down or delayed because trained ICE enforcement officers had to go to a desk and write out a justification and get pre-approval from DC to do their job.
The story of the Biden Administration’s DHS cannot be told without emphasizing just how wasteful and abusive their policies were of taxpayer resources. From willfully ignoring the law to attempting to rewrite it to actively erecting roadblocks to law enforcement, every Biden-era DHS initiative can be categorized as waste, fraud, or abuse. Thank you, and I look forward to answering the Committee’s questions.
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