New federal data reveals that Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas turned parole authority into a mass release mechanism, with 89 percent of border encounters resulting in release at the program's zenith. Breitbart has highlighted a devastating Government Accountability Office investigation that quantifies the extent of the Biden administration's border collapse. The GAO, which serves as Congress's independent investigative arm, determined that President Biden and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released approximately 90 percent of migrants encountered at the southern border during the height of their parole operation.
Before 2021, successive administrations exercised parole authority with significant restraint. Biden and Mayorkas threw out that precedent entirely, deploying so-called "humanitarian parole" at an unprecedented scale that fundamentally transformed how the border functioned.
"Specifically, our analysis showed that OFO and Border Patrol granted relatively few paroles during fiscal years 2019 and 2020," the GAO report states. "During this time period the proportion of southwest border encounters resulting in parole ranged from about 3 percent to 28 percent. The number of paroles granted increased beginning in the summer of 2021 and peaked in December 2022, when 89 percent of encounters resulted in parole. Paroles granted declined substantially after December 2022 and again after January 2025."
The fallout from this unprecedented release operation continues to plague immigration enforcement efforts. According to the GAO, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel now face enormous difficulty simply tracking down the millions of migrants who were let into the country.
"… without readily accessible information about noncitizens' parole status, ICE does not have the information it needs to identify and monitor these noncitizens, or to take enforcement action, as appropriate," the GAO report states.
While Biden and his team are no longer in power, the architects of his immigration agenda have already begun laying the groundwork to resurrect these policies when Democrats next control the government. Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as a DHS official under Biden and previously worked in the Obama administration, was recently featured in a sympathetic piece by The Seattle Times discussing her new podcast.
While serving under Biden, Trickler-McNulty pushed for a system that would permit millions of illegal aliens to simply check in with ICE annually, converting America's borders into something resembling a European checkpoint system. The vast majority of these check ins would occur electronically rather than face to face. Back in 2023, Tom Homan sounded the alarm in Breitbart News that Trickler-McNulty was working from inside DHS to close detention facilities, guaranteeing that tens of thousands of illegal aliens would be freed from federal custody and placed into Alternatives to Detention programs instead.
"Trickler-McNulty is the epitome of an ideological, corrupt bureaucrat," Homan wrote.
Mass amnesty for illegal aliens continues to drive Trickler-McNulty's policy agenda. "What I'm proposing is what I'm calling 'immigration probation,'" Trickler-McNulty told The Seattle Times. "That is the ability for an adjudicator—like USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) or an immigration judge—to place somebody in a two-year program. If they pay taxes, they comply, they report in, they show they're basically willing to interface with the government, they can ameliorate their immigration violations. That would allow them to move into a lawful status."
The Biden years provided Americans with a grim preview of what fully open borders would mean for the country, and operatives like Trickler-McNulty are already scheming to bring that nightmare back. President Trump has made meaningful progress by securing the border, but enforcement alone cannot solve this crisis. America requires sweeping legislation that establishes a full moratorium on both legal and illegal immigration until the system is restored and the needs of American workers finally take priority.
