Illegal Aliens — Still a Lot to be Done, Warns House Committee

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform met to chastise four sanctuary city mayors for impeding federal agencies in dealing with illegal aliens. Yesterday (March 11), the group met again in the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement with the topic “Enhancing Federal, State, and Local Coordination in the Fight Against Criminal Illegal Aliens.” Although this get-together wasn’t as heated as the last, there were still some strong messages presented.

Chairman Clay Higgins (R-LA) opened the meeting with comments about criminal migrants and the need for local and state law enforcement to work with the federal government. “In recent years, we have seen the weaponization of our justice system, lawlessness in our cities, and an open border that has allowed illegal drugs and dangerous gangs into our country with deadly results,” he explained.

In testimony, Kerry Doyle, former principal legal adviser to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claimed that President Donald Trump’s policies are taking things too far. She said Boston, with more than 700,000 residents, has 28% born in a country other than the United States. Mayor Michelle Wu previously claimed it was the safest largest city in the United States but added that “a scared city is not a safe city, a land ruled by fear is not the land of the free,” Doyle quoted.

She continued, claiming illegal aliens are fearful of the current climate. More than 1,000 children were absent from schools in Massachusetts due to rumors of ICE raids. She detailed arrests that included non-criminal migrants and insisted the Bay State worked well within the law regarding deportations and dealing with the undocumented.

Joseph M. Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, spent a majority of his time talking about the national security risks caused by illegal immigration. “The United States is facing the worst border and immigration crisis in its history,” he said. Over the past four years, more than 14 million illegal aliens have arrived in America, “larger than the population of 45 U.S. states or the equivalent of adding another state the population size of Pennsylvania to the union.” He added:

“If only .05 percent of this emerging illegal alien population in America is tied to or affiliated with criminal or terrorist organizations, we are facing a crime-terror contingent inside the homeland the size of the U.S. Army and U.S.S. Marine Corps combined. That is a national security emergency.”

Illegal Aliens and Weaponized Migration

“Far from a problem of ‘root causes’ derived from socio-economic hardship, natural disasters, or high-levels of insecurity, the center of gravity of the U.S. border and immigration crisis — that enabled no fewer than 14 million illegal aliens to enter the United States in four years — is Weaponized Migration,” Humire said. He defined it as “when state and non-state actors catalyze, manipulate, and/or induce mass migration to achieve political and geopolitical objectives.”

Furthermore, he claimed weaponized migration “suggests that America’s border and immigration crisis goes beyond simply a law enforcement challenge. It is a national security crisis, perhaps the greatest in our lifetime, causing an alarming threat to U.S. sovereignty and a humanitarian catastrophe for both Americans and migrants alike.”

Humire testified that since 1951, nation-states have used weaponized migration as an instrument of coercion at least 81 times. Of those, he said Dr. Kelly Greenhill, “one of the world’s foremost academics on weaponized migration,” claimed it worked at least 75% of the time, “achieving a wide range of concessions from extracting financial aid to gaining diplomatic recognition.” Quoting Greenhill, he added “coercers” normally target countries with two conditions: “First, they are open societies that respond to pressure from public opinion, and second, they have laws that require custody and protection of refugees and potential asylees.” In addition, the migration movements are deliberately created to “prevent or induce changes in political behavior or to extract concessions from targeted nation-states,” he quoted.

Humire went on, “She emphasizes that the United States has been an especially frequent target, with the tactic used against nearly every U.S. administration from Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s through George W. Bush in the first decade of the 21^st century.”

Venezuela is one of the major “weaponizers,” he claimed, “strategically engineering and steering the world’s largest mass migration, the more than 8.2 million Venezuelans that fled their country since 2014 — to the U.S. Southwest border.” Since 2021, Humire said more than 1.5 million Venezuelans have entered the United States “and is the fastest growing nationality arriving in America.” This is about 10% of the overall encounters nationwide in just four years. Additionally:

“Prior to 2021, the numbers of Venezuelan nationals encountered on U.S. borders were in the thousands. This jumped to tens of thousands in Fiscal Year 2021, then hundreds of thousands in FY 2022, and ended with almost 314,000 encountered for FY 2024 — a growth of 520 percent in four years. Add to this the Venezuelans that arrived in America through a humanitarian parole program or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and it is easily another one-half million Venezuelans resettled in the United States since 2021.”

Trump’s policies are putting a serious dent in the plans of those who wish to enter the United States illegally. It’s been only about six weeks since he was re-established in the Oval Office, but within just 10 days of becoming the commander-in-chief, US Customs and Border Protection recorded an 85% decrease in apprehensions along the southwest border compared to the same timeframe in January last year. “February 2025 saw the lowest number of monthly encounters at the U.S. southern border in recorded history, with only 8,300 encounters last month,” Humire testified.

Even though aggressive policies are stopping illegal aliens at the border, there’s still a massive number still residing in the country. “There’s more to be done,” Humire warned.