Trey Paul, FISM News
The crisis at the southern border may be more serious than some imagined.
According to a bombshell report in the New York Post, the New York City Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office is “fully booked through October 2032” for migrant asylum appointments.
NYC ICE office ‘fully booked’ for migrant appointments through late 2032: document https://t.co/a3Cw9wkYfB pic.twitter.com/xeKJlyjAr8
— New York Post (@nypost) March 14, 2023
The document shows there is a huge backlog with close to 40,000 people on the waitlist, making New York City the place with the longest pileup of migrant cases to process in the country.
With migrants possibly having to wait a decade to start the immigration court process, there’s concern that those with suspicious asylum claims could take full advantage of the chaotic situation in NYC.
At the very least, migrants will be able to stay in the U.S. for more than 10 years, something noted by Thomas Homan, the acting ICE director for the Trump administration. “If you want to stay here and fight your case for 12 years [and] if you do your research or the cartels do their research, that’s actually pretty clever,” he said.
Matt O’Brien, a former immigration judge based in Virginia says he’s seen migrants strategically “forum-shop” to get their case in a certain location. “The problem is significantly worse with people trying to get in courts where everything is delayed so that they can get work authorization and basically hang out and wait for the next amnesty,” he said.
One 23-year-old man, Victor Rodriguez, arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela late last year and told the New York Post he doesn’t have an appointment until 2025. “Before coming, I knew it was going to be complicated, but not this complicated,” he said. “I didn’t know it would take this long.”
The New York City ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations office “has capacity to see approximately 400-600 noncitizens a day on average, depending on the complexity of each case,” an agency spokesperson said.
The Big Apple is followed by two cities in Florida — Jacksonville and Miramar — when it comes to backlogs. Migrants who land in Jacksonville will have to wait until June 2028 for an appointment and January 2028 in Miramar.
“I think what [the Biden administration is] doing is they’re trying to flood the country with people who are not going to be able to get in front of a court,” O’Brien said. “I think they’re going to try and force legislative amnesty, making the same claim that they always do, which is, ‘We don’t have the resources or the political will to deport this many people.’”
The fourth worst city when it comes to asylum claims is San Antonio, with the next appointment coming available in February 2027, followed by Atlanta which is filled up until January 2027.
The major problem with all of this is that 99% of these people don’t have a valid asylum claim,” O’Brien said. “[The asylum process] is designed to protect people from persecution, primarily at the hands of a government or in certain limited circumstances at the hands of parties that government is unable or unwilling to control.”
A new study conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found illegal immigration is costing taxpayers more than $150 billion a year. FISM News also reported the study found that Americans pay more than $180 billion for services that benefit illegal immigrants.
Last October, Dan Stein, the president of FAIR said “some 2.7 million migrants, those who illegally entered or were otherwise inadmissible at a port of entry, were encountered at our borders in [fiscal year] 2022, bringing the total [number] under President Biden to a whopping 5.5 million [encounters]”
A spokesperson for ICE said in a statement that the agency is ‘working to address current processing delays at some field offices.’
According to the New York Post: “ICE, given more than a week to comment by The Post, neither disputed the accuracy of the reported backlog figure nor contradicted sources’ contention about what it meant.