Despite Tough Talk, Biden-Harris Admin Rolls Out Red Carpet for Illegal Alien Gangs: The BorderLine

Simon Hankinson / August 30, 2024

Nothing illustrates the grave price of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy like the preventable crimes that occur with dismaying frequency across the country.

At the border, Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has for nearly four years been catching, then almost immediately releasing into the U.S. interior, thousands of young illegal alien men weekly. It has also let in a million more using immigration “parole,” under the pretext that they are all fleeing persecution in their home countries and will apply for asylum. Yet the vast majority are economic migrants who likely will not qualify for asylum.

Some of these men have violent criminal histories and affiliations. But which ones? And what did they do? Because the U.S. government has no regular access to the criminal records of the countries they come from, no one knows.

On top of the adult releases and parolees, over half a million unaccompanied alien children have been allowed in on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’ watch. According to Judicial Watch, “the overwhelming majority … are not really children but rather young adults in their teens, and some have criminal histories.” Nearly three-quarters of them are over 14, and two-thirds are male.

The latest example of what all that can lead to comes from Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver—which is for immigration purposes a “sanctuary” city in a “sanctuary” state and thus an ideal environment for foreign criminals to thrive. Venezuelans make up about 40% of the migrant arrivals to Denver. The almost 20,000 Venezuelan newcomers since December 2022 give plenty of cover for a few dozen or a few hundred thugs to blend in.

In Aurora, members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have reportedly taken over an apartment complex called The Edge at Lowry. According to apartments.com, The Edge is “perfectly situated for work or play.” They might want to revise that.

The Edge was the site of a shootout a few weeks ago, and this clip from local news channel KDVR shows armed men—not law enforcement—walking around the complex this week. Colorado allows “open carry” of firearms for people over 18 unless they are convicted felons. But under federal law, it is illegal for an alien “illegally or unlawfully in the United States” to possess “any firearm or ammunition.”

That prohibition applies to the millions of illegal aliens DHS has released at the border and the roughly 2 million “gotaways” who sneaked in without being caught. However, it is uncertain whether the prohibition would apply to the million more let in under Biden’s made-up, legally dubious mass-parole programs. Paroled aliens are in a sort of legal limbo. They are not “admitted” under immigration law, but the Biden administration has given them the patina of being here “lawfully,” until their parole is revoked or their asylum has been approved or denied by the immigration court.

But I doubt these legal niceties matter much to the boys of Tren de Aragua. They seem to have acquired a critical mass at The Edge that allows them control, and they do what they want. Meanwhile, some of the complex’s hapless other residents are desperately trying to leave.

A report in June estimated that Denver has spent up to $340 million so far in costs for shelter, education, health care, and other support for the 42,000 released, paroled, or other inadmissible aliens who’ve arrived since 2022. There was $48 million in uncompensated care for 16,000 emergency room visits by uninsured illegal aliens. There was $14,000 for each of the 15,725 new students in Denver schools. There were millions more to provide free housing, job training, food, and other services through the Denver Asylum Seekers Program. Denver had to cut millions from other programs to pay for it all, including from the fire and police departments.

With a population of 713,000, Denver has taken in about one inadmissible migrant per 16 residents. In New York, by comparison, it’s more like one in 45. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has blamed his city’s problem on Texas and geography. “We are the closest, cheapest bus ticket from El Paso. It’s the cheapest ticket for [Texas] Gov. [Greg] Abbott and anyone else to buy, so they just come to Denver,” he told a Denver news outlet in January. But it’s more likely the city’s known sanctuary policy, generous benefits, and lax law enforcement that are attracting so many people. Word gets around.

But Denver is not alone.

In New York City, organized gang robberies, shootings, intramigrant violence, and assaults on police all undermine local safety while Mayor Eric Adams doles out millions in shady, no-bid contracts for housing, catering, security, and other services for his city’s extra-legal migrant population.

In Philadelphia, which has seen 183 homicides so far in 2024, an MS-13 gang member from El Salvador named Fredy Antonio Amaya-Marin recently started shooting at passing cars. He was deported back home in 2007. We don’t know when he came back, but sneaking across the U.S. border as a “gotaway” has never been easier than in the last few years.

In Chicago, the Standard Club migrant shelter houses Carlos Mavarez Viloria, who has been arrested 10 times since arriving in the U.S. a year ago for theft, drug possession, attempted robbery, trespassing, assaulting the police, and more. The Standard is also home to Pedro Izquiel Omana, who was charged with shoplifting from three local stores. But maybe Chicago’s homegrown gang violence is so bad that illegal alien crime is barely noticed.

Sen. Chris Murphy and other Biden administration allies maintain that illegal aliens commit crimes at lower rates than natives. This claim is based on intellectual sand. First, it conflates legal and illegal immigrants, which are not the same. For one thing, legal immigrants have to provide a police report from their home country showing whether they have a criminal record to get a visa, but released and paroled aliens don’t. Second, the myth cites FBI crime trackers to which a third of American cities don’t even report their crime statistics. Third, no state other than Texas records the immigration status of all accused perpetrators in the criminal process, so any conclusions for the rest are guesswork.

In any case, the American people can see with their own eyes that releasing hundreds of thousands of unvetted young men into the country is a high-risk gamble. It’s important to remember that when you hear about the supposedly great bipartisan border bill that the Senate voted down this year. Democrats continue to tout this bill when talking about wanting to get tough on the border, now that it’s getting close to November.

The Senate bill was nothing like HR 2, which passed the House in 2023 and would have bolstered border security and shut down the administration’s ability to release and parole inadmissible aliens. But the unacceptably weak Senate bill would have permanently institutionalized that practice, both through release at the border and parole, allowing even more inadmissible aliens with unknown pasts into the United States every year—almost two million more.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

Biden Administration’s Latest Illegal Immigration Scam

How Ruling Elites Continue to Stifle Debate Over Immigration Policy

NJ Town Prioritizes Protecting Illegal Aliens From ICE Over Public Safety

A Successful US Immigration Policy Would Send Venezuelans Home to Rebuild

Here’s the Chart on Illegal Immigration That Trump Was Talking About When Shot