Obtained documents have revealed that at least 160,000 illegal immigrants have been granted access into the United States as over 94,000 of them came across with border officials in southern Texas. It is said that they were allowed to enter the country as they were notices to report.
Mass release of illegal immigrants
According to Fox News, these illegal immigrants were encountered along with Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio sectors as recent information revealed that this has been happening since March 20. Also, according to the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, the notices to report (NTRs) – a.k.a. Form I-385 – instruct migrants to report themselves to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office within 60 days. This one’s different from the notices to appear (NTAs) in which its requisite is for migrants to appear at an immigration court.
Further, the website also noted that the U.S. government began giving the form to individuals who crossed the Mexico-United States border during the spring of this year.
In line with this, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official may well seem to have confirmed the details about the said notice as it provides “mechanisms to require family units released from CBP custody to report to ICE within a specified time.” The officer told Fox News that 81 percent of the migrants were no-shows for their immigration proceedings from 2014 to 2020.
Border officials using ‘prosecutorial discretion’
Border officials stationed in the Rio Grande Valley were instructed to “use prosecutorial discretion” when processing migrants. Such an order allows these officials to skip the issuance of paperwork that is a requisite for migrants as this provides them a scheduled court date.
With that in mind, former Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said that it means that these individuals are now calling the shots to apprehend people who illegally enter the U.S., whether to prosecute them or not before letting them into the country never to be seen again. He went on to say that there’s no reason for those people to be issuing NTAs for a case that they’ll never prosecute.
In August alone, over 208,000 migrants were encountered at the southern border, and in January, more than 1.3 million tried to enter the U.S. illegally.
