Posted on November 30, 2021

Biden Admin Withholds Report on Illegal Immigrant Population

Joseph Simonson, Washington Free Beacon, November 29, 2021

The Biden administration has yet to publicly disclose critical information on the number of illegal immigrants in the United States, a violation of congressional guidance and a departure from federal transparency standards.

The Department of Homeland Security has given Congress its report on the number of foreign nationals who remain in the United States on expired visas, but the information has not been subsequently released to the public, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Stretching back to at least the Obama administration, DHS has made the annual report on suspected visa overstays available to the public shortly after giving it to Congress.

{snip} Congress has mandated that the report is released online to the public, out of concern that “the large number of annual in-country alien overstays threatens national security and the integrity of legal immigration.”

The Biden administration’s failure to post the report comes as it faces an all-time high surge of migrants on the southern border. DHS has repeatedly failed to answer lawmaker questions about the criminal histories of migrants allowed entry or where those migrants have been resettled.

The failure to post the report is consistent with the administration’s dramatic changes to avoid stigmatizing the illegal immigrant population, such as banning the term alien from federal government literature, according to former immigration officials.

“For whatever reason, it appears political appointees are not disclosing a report produced by career subject matter experts,” said former Immigration and Customs Enforcement senior adviser Jon Feere. “It’s consistent with the Biden administration’s general hostility to transparency.”

“The Biden policies are a slap in the face to all State Department employees—the message is that all foreigners can ignore visa adjudicators and stay as long as they’d like,” Feere said.

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