“You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you?” former President Bill Clinton told voters at a campaign stop for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia.
“They made an ad about it, a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened. But if they’re all properly vetted, that doesn’t happen,” Clinton continued.
Clinton then went on to say that Harris is the only candidate in the race who has supported legislation that would have led to “total vetting before people got in” at the southern border.
If only that were true.
But first, Clinton should be congratulated for admitting something that Harris has not: that the southern border is not secure and dangerous migrants are being released into the United States on a daily basis.
Literally just days before the Biden-Harris administration released Laken Riley’s accused murderer, Jose Ibarra, into the U.S. on humanitarian parole, Harris assured Chuck Todd the southern border was “secure.”
By admitting that Ibarra was not vetted, and that the failure to vet him may have caused Riley’s death, Clinton is admitting that the Biden-Harris border crisis may have caused Riley’s death. Which is true. If only Harris could admit that herself.
The problem with Clinton’s argument, however, is that the Senate legislation Harris endorsed more than a year after Ibarra was released into the country without vetting does nothing actually to vet migrants who illegally cross the border. All it does is legalize the illegal Biden-Harris catch-and-release policy.
Under current law, all migrants arrested after illegally crossing the southern border are supposed to be either detained by Border Patrol for deportation proceedings or returned to Mexico. The Biden-Harris administration, however, has been instead releasing them into the country by abusing the president’s “parole” power, which is supposed to be used only on a case-by-case basis and then only for the length of time needed to complete the reason for parole.
So, for example, a migrant suffering from dehydration could be paroled to a local hospital for treatment instead of being held in custody by the Border Patrol. But after the migrant’s medical emergency is over, the Border Patrol is obligated to detain and deport him or her. Instead, President Joe Biden is just releasing migrants en masse into the country to go wherever they want and is making little attempt to track them.
Now, those migrants caught and released by Biden are being photographed and fingerprinted, and their names are being checked against Department of Homeland Security databases. But the DHS does not have any data from most countries where the migrants are coming from. If a migrant is a gang member who has killed and raped three women in his or her home country, the DHS would never know.
The scary part is that the Senate legislation Harris supports does not improve this vetting process. Worse, instead of mandating that migrants caught illegally crossing the southern border are detained until deportation by Border Patrol, it does the exact opposite. It mandates their release.
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Now, these migrants will be fitted with ankle bracelets and enrolled in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “Alternatives to Detention” programs, but as the name implies, no actual detention is involved. And under the existing Alternatives to Detention programs, ICE makes no effort to find, arrest, detain, and deport migrants who cut their ankle bracelets off, as most of them do.
It would be nice if Harris did support legislation that mandated the vetting of migrants who illegally cross the border before releasing them into the U.S. But that is not what the Senate bill does.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
