POLITICS: Biden’s ‘quiet amnesty’ for nearly 1 million illegal immigrants

President Joe Biden not only allowed 6 million to 10 million illegal aliens to walk across the border during his term — he also granted a “quiet amnesty” to nearly 1 million.

We’re only learning this now, as the Department of Justice revealed Biden officials improperly “terminated,” “dismissed” or “closed” that many cases before the nation’s immigration tribunals.

The tool for this deception was the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review — “EOIR,” pronounced like Winnie the Pooh’s sad donkey friend — which oversees deportation cases.

Under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration used EOIR to manipulate removal hearings, tanking pending cases in the name of “prosecutorial discretion.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan tracked this scam, and in October 2024, his staff issued a report revealing that “more than 700,000 illegal aliens have had their cases dismissed, terminated, or administratively closed” under Biden, which “allowed those aliens to stay in the country indefinitely without facing immigration consequences.”

That report, released 12 days before the 2024 presidential election, went largely ignored even as early votes were being cast.

Out of view

EOIR has now issued updated statistics for that report — and revealed Biden allowed nearly 1 million illegal immigrants to remain “indefinitely without facing immigration consequences.”

No press release accompanied the release of those numbers. They simply appeared on a newly published chart, deep in the minutiae of EOIR’s official statistics.

“Dismissals” and “terminations” of pending removal cases are straightforward: Immigration officers identified removable aliens and filed charges against them, but instead of litigating those cases to a just conclusion, DHS lawyers just dropped them.

Although it was described as “a docket management tool used to temporarily pause removal proceedings,” new EOIR figures show the average period a case has been administratively closed in immigration court is more than 17 years, while the average time a case is “temporarily paused” before EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals is “10,752 days” — more than 29 years.

Those are averages, so some of those cases were closed since before many readers were born.

The Biden administration knew congressional Democrats would pay a hefty price if they tried legalizing huge swathes of the “unauthorized” population it allowed into the country.

So Biden’s DHS and DOJ manipulated the immigration courts to spur a “quiet amnesty” for nearly 1 million removable aliens.

That isn’t to say these 1 million people are undeportable. But it would require ICE to find each of them, serve them with charging documents and start the court cases from scratch.

The last administration left an immigration disaster for border czar Tom Homan to clear up, the actual scope of which is just becoming clear. It’s not a pretty picture.

Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.