Rep. Clay Higgins, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, accused the Biden Administration of perpetrating a "shell game" with the numbers of immigrants entering the country since the lifting of the Title 42 restrictions. 

“The numbers of human beings crossing into America without appropriate documentation are indeed still at the record levels we saw prior to the end of Title 42,” he said in his opening statement at a June 6 subcommittee hearing on the end of so-called Title 42, the COVID-era immigration restrictions put into place by the Trump administration. 

Biden Administration witnesses denied that there is a shell game or that numbers are being manipulated and said that the immigration numbers have plummeted 70% for now.

“...the classification of those human beings and the way they’re brought into the country has been very cleverly changed by the administration,” Higgins said. “The CBP One app is being used as a type of asylum application very broadly, allowing those who register with it to move to the front of the line at ports of entry and be processed quickly into the United States as an asylum seeker without the normal asylum process and vetting.”

CBP One is a free mobile portal to multiple U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) services, including asylum-seeking, the CBP website says. It was launched by the CPB in October 2020 during the Trump administration, the CBP website says.

Higgins said that south of the Mexican border, migrants are being sent to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), where they’re being helped to use CBP One to fill out asylum applications, and then they’re bused to legal ports of entry to have their applications processed – resulting in a much lower number of refugees showing up at illegal border crossings, but without any real reduction in the numbers of people seeking entry into the U.S.

He said the administration considers seeking asylum a "legal pathway" and that individuals using CBP One to seek asylum are not included in current DHS estimates of illegal immigration. 

“These migrants would have attempted to enter the U.S. between ports of entry and would have been considered illegal aliens and intercepted or encountered by border patrol between the ports of entry...So then they tell America that the numbers of illegal migrants are down. It’s a shell game,” Higgins said.

The two Biden Administration witnesses, DHS Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy Blas Nuñez-Neto and Benjamine “Carry” Huffman, DHS acting deputy commissioner for customs and border protection, disputed Higgins’ claim that the numbers are a shell game. CBP One is just a scheduling app, and CBP’s statistics on border crossings include users of the app going to ports of entry as well as people intercepted between ports of entry, they testified.

Higgins also sharply criticized the administration for its pre-planning and response to the end of Title 42 in a media advisory announcing the meeting.

“President Biden and (Department of Homeland Security) Secretary Mayorkas have failed this country with their open border policies. Instead of securing the Southern border in preparation for the end of Title 42, their strategy was to continue incentivizing lawlessness at the expense of the American people and to tie the hands of our dedicated Border Patrol,” he said.

Ranking Minority Member Lou Correa (D-CA) disagreed with Higgins' characterization of preparations and border security failing with the end of Title 42. He said he'd visited several border patrol stations and found no lack of preparation for the expected numbers and that border officials had performed admirably in the surge of immigrants before the end of Title 42.

Correa also said refugees are a worldwide problem and that it’s worse now than ever in history. “World War II, sixty million individuals on the move. Today, we’re confirmed it, a greater number of individuals moving throughout the world displaced,” he said.

Title 42 was an emergency health mandate imposed in March 2020, allowing U.S. officials to refuse migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border to fight COVID-19. This resulted in 2.8 million migrants being turned away, disrupting the prior asylum-seeking process, the Associated Press said in a recent article. Despite opposition from Republicans, President Biden, after initially maintaining Title 42, terminated it on May 11.

Nuñez-Neto said DHS led a comprehensive planning effort for 18 months to prepare for the end of Title 42 and made record deployments of personnel, infrastructure and resources to the border. DHS also issued policies intended to disincentivize unlawful entry while encouraging lawful processes and pathways to enter the U.S., he said.

Harsh penalties for unlawful entry were reimplemented, including a five-year ban from reentering the country and possible prison time for reentry attempts. DHS has repatriated more than 38,400 asylum seekers in more than 80 countries including Mexico, which is, for the first time in history, allowing the repatriation of non-Mexican nationals within its borders, he said. 

Huffman testified that in the days leading up to the lifting of Title 42, CBP encounters with migrants reached historic highs of roughly 10,000 per day and that in the weeks since, those numbers have dropped by 70%.

However, there was agreement among members of the committee from both political parties that the number of people trying to enter the U.S. from the southern border will rise substantially in the future.