Senior DHS Official Admits Cartel Smuggling Business Booming Under Biden
Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy Blas Nunez-Neto admitted during a recent interview that the cartel’s human smuggling business is booming under President Joe Biden’s leadership.
Nunez-Neto made the comments during an interview with the Migration Policy Institute, pointing out that illegal aliens flooding across the wide-open southern border have been paying a lot of money to the cartels to smuggle them to the United States.
“We see migrants now routinely paying smuggling organizations vast sums of money — often more than $10,000 to $15,000 — to facilitate their journey to the border,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official went on to point out that all of this money is going straight into the pockets of Mexican cartels.
“This is so lucrative, in fact, that we are now seeing the drug cartels increasingly becoming a key player in not just collecting taxes for people who transit through their territory — which is what we saw historically — but actually moving people and becoming deeply involved in human smuggling, not just in Mexico, but throughout the region,” Nunez-Neto said.
He also pointed to the Biden administration’s catch-and-release illegal immigration policy and asylum rules as measures that make smuggling more profitable. Under these policies, cartels are able to essentially guarantee that illegal aliens make it across the southern border and get released into the U.S. interior — especially thanks to the immense backlog in immigration courts.
“I think we are seeing the court system essentially become a proxy legal pathway for people to come into the United States and work while they’re here … and it’s leading to these huge backlogs that we are seeing in the courts as well,” Nunez-Neto said.
Rather than trying to solve the serious problem of mass illegal immigration, Biden has created a new “parole” system that allows individuals who would typically cross the border illegally to download a smartphone app to apply for asylum and be granted almost immediate access to the U.S. without the need for a visa.
In the past two years of Biden’s presidency, the administration has allowed more than 541,000 illegal aliens into the U.S. through their parole system.
“I think in general, our approach has been that we would like to see individuals using safe and orderly pathways and processes to come into the country,” Nunez-Neto said, adding: “We think there’s a significant public benefit associated with channeling people into these lawful processes.”
However, as the Daily Wire noted, “the problem is that the Left’s definition of ‘order’ simply means that illegal aliens are ‘processed’ by immigration officials and then released into the country via new ‘legal’ measures — such as the smartphone app.”
“‘Order’ to the Democrats does not mean having the necessary physical barriers or manpower necessary at the U.S.-Mexico border to deter entry,” the outlet explained. “Nor does it include enforcing policies that effectively prevent illegal immigrants from entering the nation in the first place.”
Meanwhile, the serious problem of mass illegal immigration isn’t just affecting border states anymore — as “sanctuary cities” like New York City are facing homelessness crises and other negative effects of a massive increase in their illegal alien populations.
