Mayorkas Creates DACA Giveaway for 100,000s of Trafficked UAC Migrants
Neil Munro, Breitbart, March 8, 2022
President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief is offering work permits to the hundreds of thousands of young migrants who were smuggled into the United States via the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) pipeline.
The new policy will provide “even more of a bonus for the smugglers and for the unscrupulous employers who look forward to being able to put these [UAC] minors to work in their poultry plants, restaurants, landscaping companies, and fields,” said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. ‘They’re going to rubber-stamp [the work permit applications] as quickly as they can,” she added.
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The program is a stealthy spin-off of the highly controversial DACA giveaway — the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” created by President Barack Obama in 2012 for roughly 800,000 migrants. Under DACA, officials give no-deportation passes and work permits to people who say they are illegal aliens.
“They’re creating the next DACA-like population,” said Rob Law, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security for President Donald Trump. “This is about giving work permits to the illegal-alien population … it’s about establishing the class of next non-U.S. citizen workers in the country.”
The numbers are potentially huge. In 2009, just 3,533 young people from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador claimed UAC status as they crossed the border. The number jumped to 21,000 in 2013, and then 52,000 in 2o14. The UACs numbers dropped to 15,687 in 2020 under President Donald Trump’s cautious policies but spiked to 114,0211 under Mayorkas’s easy-migration rules.
Overall, almost 600,000 UAC migrants had entered the country by January 2022, just 14 years after Congress unanimously passed the UAC law in 2008.
Biden’s border chief is Alejandro Mayorkas at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mayorkas is portraying the giveaway as a benevolent gift to abandoned young migrants, dubbed “Special Immigrant Juveniles,” or SIJs.
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Under the 2008 UAC law, young migrants can ask border officials to treat them as unaccompanied alien children — even when coyotes and cartels publicly deliver them to the border in chartered buses that are funded by the migrants’ parents or by labor traffickers. Border officers then relay the blocs of supposedly unaccompanied migrants to the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency then relays the migrants to unverified sponsors after a security check, which is kept cursory because officials know the sponsors are usually labor traffickers or the youths’ illegal-immigrant parents.
“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a ProPublica reporter. {snip}
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The “everyone in the system knows” category includes many federal legislators and Mayorkas. He told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in a March 2021 interview that “we need to invest and address the root causes so that parents do not need to send their children … to be placed in the hands of traffickers.”
At least 60 percent of the UACs are work-ready male youths, aged 16 or older the year they arrive. Many walk away from federal supervision to illegally take jobs that would otherwise go to diverse Americans at higher wages.
The younger UACs are the left-behind children of illegal migrants in the United States. The joint DHS-coyote smuggling route encourages migrants to separate themselves from their families by first going alone to the United States. The Mayorkas/coyote network also minimizes pressure on illegal migrants to go home, boosting New York City and other cities that prefer to build an economy on cheap labor.
The SIJ program was created in 1990 “to give [legal] status to kids who are on their own, truly left on their own, with no one else to turn to here in the United States — [such as] victims of trafficking or abandoned kids or orphans,” Vaughan said. “But the [implementing] rules were written with loopholes that you can drive a truck through,” she added.
The SIJ program is now being used by Mayorkas to help legalize the migrants who got into the country via the UAC program.
The UAC program was passed unanimously by Congress in 2008. It was also portrayed as a small-scale, short-term rescue program for the children who were victims of sex trafficking, for example.
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But the UAC law cuts off when DHS officials can no longer pretend that the young men and women are children. Three years after a young man tells border officials that is really aged 15, he is recorded as being an 18-year-old adult in the federal documents.
That is where Mayorkas’s new SIJ rule is intended to take over from the UAC law.
The SIJ law allows young migrant adults to ask judges for SIJ status — and green cards and citizenship — on the grounds that they were abandoned by the parents who funded their trip to the United States, and who usually stay in close contact via cellphones. They can ask for green cards even if one of their illegal-migrant parents is standing in the courtroom, said Vaughan.
The parents accused of abuse cannot defend themselves in court. But they do not want to defend themselves because they prefer the state judges — not federal judges — to award green cards to their children, she added.
But the SIJ pathway to green cards is already clogged.
Tens of thousands of former UACs are getting new SIJ status so they can apply for green cards. Yet the number of green cards awarded each year to the SIJs is limited because they come from the roughly 10,000 green cards allocated for various competing categories of “EB-4” migrants.
The number of claimed SIJs who were approved to get green cards spiked from 1,590 in 2012 up to 15,101 in 2016.
Mayorkas’s support for migrants includes two measures.
First, Mayorkas’s plan would reward the young migrants by giving them work permits before they eventually get their green cards.
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The new rules will encourage more labor migration into Americans’ jobs, responded Law. “You’re going to have an increased volume … USCIS is [becoming] a work-permit factory for illegal aliens instead of actually adjudicating legal immigration benefits,” he said.
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