White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was slammed by critics after boasting Monday about the Biden administration’s humanitarian “parolee” program for asylum seekers from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela — as the US preps for a fresh surge of migrants at the southern border.
“You’ve seen the parolee program be so successful,” Jean-Pierre said during her press briefing. “It has, it has, it has, when it comes to illegal migration, you’ve seen it come down by more than 90%, and that’s because of this act — the actions that this President has taken.”
The program, instituted in October for Venezuelans and extended to residents of the other three countries in January, has allowed 30,000 asylum seekers who followed the legal application process to be admitted to the US each month.
Migrants from those countries who showed up at the border without applying for the process were swiftly expelled.
The program had contributed to an overall drop in enforcement encounters at the border, from a record high of 252,012 people in December to 156,787 in January. By March, however, that number had bounced back to 191,899, according to the DHS, which had not yet released numbers for April.
Enforcement encounters involving citizens of the four countries targeted by the program had dropped from 91,346 to 14,509 in March — a decline of 84% rather than the “more than 90%” Jean-Pierre claimed.
“Looking forward to reactions from the people who set their hair on fire over Sean Spicer’s crowd size numbers,” joked one Twitter user, Steve Robinson.
“I mean this is just the worse [sic] of her lying for this administration,” said another user. “She may believe it, doubt it, but this is a flat-out lie.”
“A provable lie,” sniffed GOP operative Matt Mackowiak. “Execrable.”
Tens of thousands of migrants hoping to seek asylum in the US are now waiting in Juarez, Mexico for Title 42 to expire on May 11.
The Trump-era emergency health order — which was extended by Biden last year — has been used to expel some 2.5 million migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 73,000 asylum seekers have crossed the southern border in the last 10 days as panic set in ahead of the order’s lapse, the US Border Patrol said Monday. Officials added that 17,000 “gotaways” avoided detection and entered the US illegally.
Overall, the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was at an estimated 11.5 million as of February 2022, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent research organization.
That figure was up from 10.2 million when President Biden took office in January 2021, but down from 11.8 million in January of 2016, when Barack Obama was president.
During the first three years of the Trump administration, there were between 11.4 and 11.5 million illegal immigrants in the country, the group estimated. Figures were not available for 2020 or this year.