Letter to Hon. Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security - Amodei Urges Investigation Into Release of Illegal Immigrants

Letter

Dear Mr. Secretary,

Increasingly, our constituents have contacted our offices with concerns and outrage over recent reports of aliens being transported and released, at taxpayer expense, into the interior of the United States under the cover of darkness. In light of these reports, we urgently request that you provide our offices a report, broken down by congressional district, detailing how many migrants who have entered the country illegally have been released into the United States, the cost to the federal government of transporting these migrants prior to release, and what security and health screening protocols were in place associated with any such release.

As you know, the situation at our Southern Border has deteriorated rapidly over the last twelve months and has become an unmitigated crisis with millions of illegal border crossers encountered and untold numbers more entering our country undetected since President Biden's inauguration. Concerningly, recent media reports indicate that your department has reverted to the Obama-era policy of catch and release, with videos showing hundreds of apprehended migrants simply walking out of detention facilities and into local communities. This Administration's disastrous border security policies are fueling the current surge by doing little more than processing migrants rapidly into the country, creating an environment that only encourages the increasing lawlessness along the border and in our local communities.

More galling still, further reports indicate that taxpayer money is being used to secretively ferry these individuals from detention facilities near the border to points farther into the interior of the United States, presumably for release.

In addition to our concerns surrounding your department's policies with respect to detention of illegal border crossers, it is our firm belief that taxpayer resources should not be used to transport these individuals to secondary destinations within the interior, especially without proper notification to Members of Congress and local law-enforcement officials as well as full transparency for the general public.

With COVID-19 still spreading rapidly throughout the country now is certainly not the time to inundate our local communities with migrants who crossed the border illegally. Moreover, at a time when our fragile economy is recovering and Americans are struggling with the effects of record levels of inflation, the influx of illegal labor into our local communities poses the very real threat of suppressing the wages of local American and legal migrant workers. Nonetheless, it seems your department is intent on pursuing policies that will only exacerbate these issues.

As such, we respectfully request that you provide our offices with information detailing how many migrants that have entered the country illegally have been transported and released into the interior, the cost to the federal government of transporting these migrants prior to release and what, if any, health and security screening protocols have been applied to those migrants. We look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,