President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has given cellphones, with the intent of tracking their whereabouts, to more than 255,000 border crossers and illegal aliens released into the United States over the last year.
The data, published by DHS, reveals the extent to which the Biden administration has ballooned the size of the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program to more easily and quickly released hundreds of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities.
Hundreds of thousands more border crossers and illegal aliens are released into the U.S. interior with only Notices to Appear (NTA) in federal immigration court at later dates. Federal data has long suggested that a tiny fraction of border crossers and illegal aliens end up having valid asylum claims.
The latest ATD figures show that from October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022, Biden’s DHS gave cellphones to monitor more than 255,000 border crossers and illegal aliens. The phones are meant to be used so the agency can track their locations. The phones cannot be used to search the internet or make other calls.
The cost to American taxpayers is more than $360,000 every day.
For comparison, just 26,000 border crossers and illegal aliens were given the cellphones for monitoring purposes in Fiscal Year 2021 — indicating the Biden administration has increased the use of the program by about 880 percent.
The number of border crossers and illegal aliens released on DHS’s “non-detained docket” now exceeds more than 3.3 million — a foreign population with no immigration status that is roughly seven times the population of Miami, Florida. As the data suggests, less than 10 percent of those border crossers and illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior are monitored by the agency.
Since Biden took office in late January 2021, his DHS has released about 1.35 million border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities — exceeding the populations of eight states.
In total, about 2.2 million border crossers and illegal aliens have arrived in the U.S. since Biden took office, including those who successfully crossed the border, undetected by Border Patrol agents.
Months ago, the Biden administration publicly defended their proposal to begin providing federal identification cards to border crossers and illegal aliens who they plan to release into American communities. The goal of the proposal is to make securing public benefits easier.