President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building what critics are calling a “ghost mode operation” so migrants can more easily stay in the United States after they are released from federal custody at the southern border.
The little-known pilot program, operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is meant to reduce the frequency with which migrants released into the U.S. interior from the border must report to an ICE field office, people familiar with the matter detailed to Breitbart News.
Rather than the standard of having migrants check in with an ICE agent in person, the program allows migrants to check in via a cellphone or computer. A key flaw with the program, critics say, is that ICE agents are unable to grab GPS data on migrants who check in with a computer.
Even more alarming is that the program does not yet have any consequences for migrants who fail to check in with ICE agents via cellphone or computer, critics note.
“As if releasing millions of illegal aliens into our country wasn’t bad enough, now Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are allowing those released illegals to go ‘ghost mode,’ making it almost impossible for ICE agents to locate them in the future, should they abscond,” RJ Hauman, president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE), told Breitbart News.
Even when GPS data is grabbed by ICE agents for migrants checking in through their cellphones, people familiar with the matter said that data is only stored for a week, rendering it useless afterward should agents need to locate a migrant weeks, months, or years later.
Those familiar with the program said just under 150 migrants are currently enrolled, but DHS leadership has purchased enough capacity to enroll 100,000 migrants. Issues with security breaches as well as the program not being completely compatible with Android cellphones have spawned headaches for the agency.
Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies, who served at ICE under former President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News that any such program that keeps migrants from having to check in with ICE agents face to face “is a national security risk.”
“The effort to move away from in-person check-ins is an admission that our porous borders have created too large of a workload for ICE,” Feere said. “The administration should be trying to hire more ICE officers. Instead, they’ve allowed millions of largely unknown individuals to enter our country and are now reducing monitoring of these individuals in a manner that is sure to undermine public safety.”
Those familiar with the matter said ICE agents are unhappy with the program, as they were hardly involved in its building despite being tasked with doing the work.
Instead, critics have described the program as a pipedream of anti-enforcement political appointees who want to see migrants remain in the United States interior indefinitely.
“ICE is a law enforcement agency, not a Silicon Valley startup,” Hauman said. “ICE agents want to focus on arresting, detaining, and deporting illegals, rather than accommodating lawbreakers.”
The program is among a handful of pilot plans carried out by the Biden-Harris administration.
The most controversial of the pilot programs has been Biden and Harris’s effort to issue ID cards to migrants once they have crossed the border and been released into the United States interior. The goal of the ID cards is to make it easy for migrants to pass through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screenings at airports.
Though the ID cards have yet to be launched by DHS, the program has already cost about $3 million, with the hope of enrolling some 10,000 migrants.
Similarly, last year the Biden-Harris administration proposed the “Release and Reporting Management” (RRM) program which would have migrants released into the United States interior check in with ICE agents electronically just once a year.
Though RRM was pushed by political appointees, it has been on hold at DHS.
Deportation and detention should be at the forefront of any program spearheaded by ICE, critics told Breitbart News. For example, the federal government continues to have very limited detention space for the hundreds of thousands arriving at the border every month on Biden and Harris’s watch.
Meanwhile, only a fraction of migrants released at the border are placed into monitoring programs, with the overwhelming majority having little monitoring — or none at all.
“Biden and Harris should put Americans’ security first and scrap this ghost-mode operation,” Hauman said. “ICE needs more deportation officers and prosecuting attorneys coupled with a serious investment in detention space.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.