Illegal immigrants with criminal records are being released into the US, an ICE agent told Fox News Thursday in a report that included new video of a busload of adult, male migrants getting dropped off at a Texas airport.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, who’s involved in the migrant release operation, said it’s been going on discreetly since the spring, Fox News reported.
The unidentified official said some of the migrants who’ve been released have criminal records for misdemeanors including assault, drunken driving, drug possession and illegal re-entry, correspondent Bill Melugin said.
ICE didn’t deny the releases, saying they are done on a case-by-case basis after all factors are taken into consideration, Melugin said.
Fox News also aired a live video shot at the San Antonio International Airport in Texas that showed about two dozen men who gathered their belongings and lined up on a sidewalk before being escorted into the terminal.
A woman near the head of the line, who reportedly works for an unidentified non-governmental organization, held up her hand to try to shield her face from the camera.
“People at the airport told us they’ve seen these mass ICE releases happening for months,” Melugin tweeted.
The video came to light after The Post last year exclusively revealed that planeloads of underage migrants were being flown into the Westchester County Airport under cover of darkness.
It also followed Thursday’s expose in The Post about a police bodycam recording from Aug. 13 that captured interviews with federal contractors involved in those flights.
In the video, one contractor blamed the surreptitious nature of the operation on President Biden’s administration, saying, “Because if this gets out, the government is betraying the American people.”
On Tuesday, Fox News televised what it said was the first video recording to document the release of adult migrants into the US at the Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas.
Some of those migrants reportedly said they were headed to Atlanta, Houston and Miami after paying $2,000 each to be smuggled into the US by a Mexican cartel.
An independent journalist, Ali Bradley, also posted an 8-second video clip on Twitter on Wednesday that she said showed single adult migrants waiting inside the San Antonio airport.
“In just hours I saw more than 130 single adults dropped off,” she wrote.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden’s administration was continuing to expel adult migrants under a federal law known as “Title 42,” which allows the government to deny people entry to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
“Migrants who cannot be expelled under Title 42 are placed into immigration proceedings, and one of those avenues could be placement in an alternative-to-detention program in the interior of the United States,” Psaki said.
“Sometimes, that means moving migrants to other parts of the United States to move to different detention facilities, where they wait for next steps in the immigration process, such as a court hearing, and are required to check in with a local ICE office.”
Also this week, US Customs and Border Protection released statistics that show it encountered 178,840 migrants at the southern border in December, up 2 percent from November.
Less than half of the encounters — 78,589 — led to an individual being processed for expulsion through Title 42, according the data.
*story by The New York Post
