Cash to Illegal Immigrants Is the New Low in Biden’s Open-Borders Push

I t goes without saying: No one should get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for entering our country illegally. But late last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration was considering payments of up to $450,000 each to illegal aliens who were caught illegally entering our country in 2018. A family of four could receive almost $2 million. There’s since been a confused back-and-forth. When Biden was initially asked about paying illegal aliens, he gave a refreshingly honest answer: He called the reports “garbage” and waved the topic off. The rare moment of honesty with the American people did not last long. White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre later said the Biden administration might be open to it. Then, on Saturday, Biden said such illegal immigrants “deserve some kind of compensation.” Events like this show how beholden Biden is to the far-left open-borders lobby and his own staff. It’s not a common thing in American politics for a president to contradict himself so plainly and openly.

This all stems from a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of illegal-alien families. They claim that their constitutional rights were violated in 2018 when they were detained, in accordance with U.S. immigration laws, without their children.

Usually, frivolous lawsuits seeking sky-high payouts would be contested and promptly tossed out of court. But these are not usual times. Instead, the Biden administration is acting more like an ACLU co-counsel and looking to give illegal aliens a big payday at American taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, this gambit is nothing new. It follows in the footsteps of the Obama era’s “Sue and Settle” strategy. It worked like this: The administration would invite lawsuits from politically connected groups, usually over regulations, and then settle, acquiescing to the demands and setting new standards that circumvented the regulatory process. This often involved big payouts to the political allies posing as legal adversaries.

The ACLU suit dovetails nicely with the mission of the president’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families. Created just two weeks after President Biden took office, the task force has a two-fold mission: to get money to illegal aliens via legal settlements and to find illegal aliens deported during the Trump administration and bring them back into the United States.

According to its September 21 interim report, the task force is engaged in multiple settlement negotiations. That means the ACLU lawsuit may be only the tip of the iceberg. And that is why Congress should act now to expressly prohibit any and all payments.

Congress could do a few things. First, it could expressly prohibit any settlement money going to illegal aliens. Full stop. It’s really that simple.

Next, it could disband the task force and demand a full accounting of all its activities and meetings. The American people deserve to know which government officials lined up with open-borders advocates to raid the Treasury.

Finally, Congress could put some commonsense limits on the ability of the executive branch to enter into these types of settlements. Requiring congressional approval for settlements above a certain amount would be a good start.

It’s past time for Congress to step in. The Biden administration has shown no interest in stopping the worst border crisis in American history. In fact, it seems to be doing everything it can to make the crisis worse. Biden officials are trying to find a way to avoid complying with a federal judge’s order to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program. They are working with congressional allies to try to ram through the largest amnesty for illegal aliens in U.S. history in a reconciliation bill. And they are trying to circumvent our immigration laws by designing a system in which bureaucrats grant asylum at the border to anyone who shows up and says the magic word “asylum.”

The overwhelming majority of those who come here illegally do so for economic reasons. To help some illegal aliens hit the jackpot at the American taxpayers’ expense would only encourage more to come. It would also encourage more lawyers to dream up ways to get in on the action, too.

Promoting these lawsuits also insults the men and women of the Border Patrol. Essentially, the ACLU alleges that, in performing its legal duties, the Border Patrol acted with racial animus and violated the constitutional rights of illegal aliens. If the government were to settle these claims, it would be disowning the people who risk their lives to secure our borders in accordance with federal immigration law.

Morale in the Border Patrol is already in the tank. The Biden administration invited a rush at the border, took away the tools to deal with it, then threw horse-patrol agents under the bus at the first uttering of a patently false narrative. Worse, the administration is now pushing full steam ahead on a vaccine mandate that could severely reduce the Border Patrol workforce.

The Biden administration already has the worst record on immigration and border security in American history. But contemplating $450,000 payments to illegal aliens marks a new low. As Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has noted, the families of American soldiers who lose their lives fighting for our country get only $100,000. The amount an illegal-alien family receives could even far exceed the awards given to some 9/11 victims’ families, who were permanently separated from the loved ones when terrorists attacked our country.

The families of Border Patrol agents who die in the line of duty receive nowhere near as much as this. And the Angel Families who have lost loved ones in crimes committed by illegal aliens receive nothing.

Congress must step in to stop this madness. The Biden administration certainly won’t stop itself.