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By Ira Mehlman
FAIR

As Bob Dylan sang, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Those lyrics aptly describe the position of the Biden-Harris administration as they pack up their desks and prepare to move out. Not only did President Biden’s handpicked successor suffer a resounding defeat at the polls earlier this month, but his party lost its majority in the U.S. Senate and fell short of its goal of retaking control of the House of Representatives.

The president’s wildly unpopular open borders policies are a good part of the reason why his vice president and the Democratic Party fared so poorly at the polls. But rather than internalizing the clear message sent by the voters, the Biden administration appears to be using its final weeks in office to make it as difficult as possible for the incoming Trump administration to carry out its promise to remove illegal aliens from the country.

Just days before President Biden decided to drop his faltering bid for reelection, his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed that the department was working on a new feature of its ICE Portal app to assist illegal aliens. This feature would allow illegal aliens who have already been released into the country to avoid required in-person check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency tasked with tracking their whereabouts.

Last week, DHS announced that it would begin to use the new app feature to allow illegal aliens awaiting their court dates in New York to do virtual check-ins starting next month. Immigration courts in New York are currently backlogged through October 2032, meaning that illegal aliens using the app would not have to show their faces to an ICE officer for the next eight years.

Efficiency is likely not the primary goal of this new program. Preventing the Trump administration from finding and removing illegal aliens is. The app software reportedly does not reveal the user’s location, making it more difficult for the new administration to find illegal aliens prioritized for removal. And, of course, a high-priority illegal alien who can avoid walking into an ICE office by using the app instead is one who will require agency time, money, and manpower to apprehend.

The departing administration clearly understands that starting new programs is much easier than terminating them, which is why they are rushing to get the check-in app up and running before they go. History indicates that even discretionary programs, once implemented, are met with lawsuits when a subsequent administration attempts to end them. Even if the government ultimately prevails – which it is likely to do – the lawsuit will eat up valuable time in the new administration’s efforts to remove illegal aliens from the country.

At the same time, the outgoing Biden administration is torquing up a little-known program that it created in 2023. The program is supposed to incentivize cooperation from illegal alien workers who assist in investigations of workplace violations. Known as Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement (DALE), it grants cooperative illegal aliens work permits and four-year protection from removal.

According to the Los Angeles Times, over 7,700 DALE protections have been granted in some 50 federal and state investigations of unscrupulous employers. With the assistance of NGOs, DHS is rushing to process DALE applications for illegal aliens who are willing to step up and accuse their employers of wrongdoing before the clock runs out on the current administration. The Times reports that pop-up DALE registration sites in Los Angeles are drawing large crowds, to the point where some illegal aliens are traveling in the hopes of getting their applications filed and processed in time for the Biden DHS to approve them before January 20.

Organizers of these DALE recruitment efforts fully expect that the Trump administration will end the program. Rescinding the protections and work authorizations already granted (which would carry beneficiaries through the end of President Trump’s term) will be more complicated.

Virtually every immigration policy action taken by the Biden administration since it took office was designed to limit future administrations’ ability to reverse them. The goal has always been to create circumstances under which mass amnesty would be seen as the only viable option to address the sheer number of people living here illegally, no matter how unpopular it might be with the American public.

These initiatives, taken even after the American people repudiated their policies, seem to be one last act of defiance on the part of an administration that has spent every day of the past four years defying the will of the American people on immigration and the border.

Author: FAIR

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