During a recent Senate hearing, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) got the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration to admit that since the beginning of the year DHS has allowed nearly 1,000 illegal aliens to use arrest warrants or deportation notices as valid identification for boarding flights to take them into the interior of the United States.
In response to more inquiries by Hawley, TSA Administrator David Pekoske added:
"They have an interview with the [TSA] officers that are on scene at the checkpoint …. They will bring in the federal security director if needed …. We aren't looking at whether a person is legal or illegal in the country [because] our role is to make sure that people that might pose a risk to transportation is significant enough to either require enhanced screening or to not allow them to fly."
Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, finds it "almost comical" that TSA is issuing arrest warrants that are then allowed as proper identification to board a plane.
"In order to get from the border to wherever it is they want to go, very often [those illegal immigrants] have to fly there," he notes. "They don't have the necessary documents to get past the TSA checkpoint – and so now the Department of Homeland Security and TSA are saying We can allow them to use their arrest warrants to get on a plane."
As Mehlman points out, the warrants tell TSA nothing about those individuals – except that they crossed the border illegally and provided "some name" to U.S. officials as they crossed.
"All of us [who travel by air] have to go through the process when we go the airport to prove that we [are who we say we are and] do not pose a threat to our fellow passengers," the FAIR spokesman notes. "And yet, if you come across the border and TSA hands you a piece of paper, somehow that entitles you to get on a plane?"
With the midterms coming it is up, Mehlman says it's up to voters to make the determination where America is headed. "Immigration," he states, "is certainly one of the top-tier issues on the minds of American voters – and they are going to have to choose accordingly."
On numerous occasions, FAIR has accused the Biden administration of "deliberately instigating" the crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border. Just last month, says FAIR, the number of encounters along the border in June (207,416) set a single-month record, bringing the total to just over two-million for FY2022; and June was the 16th straight month with more than 150,000 encounters.
