illegal immigration
Biden And Red States Are On Immigration Collision Course Heading For Supreme Court
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The Biden administration is currently waging a legal campaign against Republican-led states, arguing their laws that effectively restrict illegal immigration are unconstitutional.
The Department of Justice has so far filed lawsuits against three different states for enacting laws that largely empower police to enforce immigration rules. However, these state leaders, in the backdrop of an unprecedented border crisis, say they have no choice but to take up the issue themselves because the Biden administration won’t — and other Republican states may soon follow suit.
Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma have all signed similar bills into law in recent months that make it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. Texas Senate Bill 4, Iowa Senate File 2340, and Oklahoma House Bill 4156 empower their law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants and bestow various penalties for unlawful presence in the country.
“Due to the abdication of this administration’s duty to enforce the law, states are trying to protect themselves,” Matt Crapo, a senior attorney with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They are trying to do so by mirroring federal law, enforcing the same type of laws if this administration was enforcing the law.”
The Biden administration, however, argues these laws are unconstitutional as they intrude on the federal government’s sole authority to enforce immigration law.
Whether or not these states can enforce their laws will likely depend on the Supreme Court. The law passed in Texas, the first of the three to take up this approach, will likely end up back into the nation’s highest court.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute, a legal organization that supports stricter immigration enforcement, filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Texas SB4. Crapo said his organization plans to file similar briefs supporting the Iowa and Oklahoma bills once those states file in opposition to preliminary injunctions imposed by federal courts.
IRLI argued in its Texas brief that, while SB4 “parallels” similar federal immigration offenses, the law does not interfere with the federal government’s power to decide which classes of aliens are admissible or removable.
However, not all legal experts agree the Texas law adheres to the Constitution.
“SB4 is cruel, inhumane, and clearly unconstitutional,” Kate Melloy Goettel, senior legal director at the American Immigration Council, said in March statement. “All these bills could result in significant civil rights abuses, leading to widespread arrests and deportations by state actors without key federal protections.”
“Our hope is that SB4 is ultimately blocked in court; otherwise, this sets a disastrous precedent,” Goettel continued.
Immigration experts aren’t sure how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule.
“It’s sort of an open question as to whether the Supreme Court is going to allow Texas to criminalize illegal entry into Texas,” Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies said to the DCNF, noting how this case is fundamentally different than the lawsuit against a 2010 Arizona law that criminalized illegal immigration status, but was largely struck down. “Texas’ argument is ‘look, the federal government doesn’t completely occupy the field with respect to this crime because trespassing is an essential state crime and this is basically a trespassing offense.’”
Arthur noted that the Texas legislation is fundamentally different to the Iowa and Oklahoma laws, meaning potentially very different outcomes in their court challenges. Unlike Oklahoma and Iowa, Texas borders Mexico and has more standing to enforce trespassing.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in SB4 will give us a lot of idea of how much vitality these other laws have, but these other laws are distinguishable from SB4,” he said. “For that reason, if the states are serious about this, they will have to litigate it all the way up to the Supreme Court.”
Similar to what sponsors of this legislation have argued, Arthur said that the passages of these state laws are not “political stunts,” but cries for help and assertions that the Biden administration has abandoned immigration enforcement.
Federal immigration data show that illegal immigration is at historic levels.
Border Patrol agents have had more than 1,171,000 encounters with illegal immigrants this fiscal year, according to the latest data by Customs and Border Protection. Well over six million such encounters have been made since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s White House tenure.
The massive influx of illegal immigrants has been followed by high-profile crimes, such as the killing of a Georgia nursing student allegedly at the hands of a Venezuelan illegal immigrant and the attempted breach of the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia allegedly by two Jordanian nationals living unlawfully in the country. A report by a New Jersey lawmaker found that his state is shelling out over $7 billion annually to cover the costs of illegal immigrants.
For these reasons, Republican state leaders say they have no choice but to address the crisis themselves — even if the Biden administration threatens to sue them for it.
“The Biden administration refuses to do their job, so we need to do it,” Louisiana state senator Valarie Hodges said to the DCNF. Hodges is the sponsor of a bill that, if signed into law, will also make illegal immigration a state crime.
Her legislation, Senate Bill 388, makes illegal entry punishable by up to one year in prison and a $4,000 fine for the first offense, and up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine for a second offense. The bill has already passed both chambers in the state legislature, and needs procedural approval from the state senate before heading to the governor’s desk.
Much like the governors and attorneys general of the states already sued by the Department of Justice, the state senator appeared unfazed at the prospect of a court challenge.
“When the federal government won’t do their job, what course do we have?” Hodges asked. “We’re going to collapse if we don’t do something. I believe we are within our constitutional boundaries to do this.”
“Maybe we should sue them for not doing their job,” she added.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
illegal immigration
While Trump has southern border secure, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants still flooding in from Canada
From The Center Square
By
Under the Biden administration, the greatest number of illegal border crossers at the U.S.-Canada border were reported in U.S. history, breaking records nearly every month for four years, The Center Square first reported.
While record high numbers dropped under the Trump administration, illegal entries still remain high in northern border states, with some states reporting more apprehensions in 2025 than during the Biden years.
Fourteen U.S. states share the longest international border in the world with Canada, totaling 5,525 miles across land and water.
The majority of illegal border crossers were apprehended and encountered in five northern border states, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data analyzed by The Center Square. Nearly half were reported in New York. Washington, Vermont, Maine and Montana recorded the next greatest numbers.
The majority of northern border states reported the greatest number of illegal entries in U.S. history in 2024, the last year of the Biden administration, according to CBP data. At the height of the border crisis, illegal entries reached nearly 200,000 at the northern border in 2024 and in 2023, first reported by The Center Square.
For fiscal years 2022 through 2025, 754,928 illegal border crossers were reported in 14 northern border states, according to the latest available CBP data.
From west to east, illegal entries at the northern border totaled:
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Alaska: 7,380
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Washington: 135,116
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Idaho: 620
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Montana: 32,036
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North Dakota: 14,818
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Minnesota: 8,315
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Wisconsin: 118
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Michigan: 50,321
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Ohio: 1,546
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Pennsylvania: 19,145
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New York: 363,910
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Vermont: 61,790
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New Hampshire: 82
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Maine: 59,731
Notably, Alaska, Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin reported record high illegal crossings in 2023. Although Montana and North Dakota saw a drop in 2025 from record highs in 2024, the number of illegal border crossers apprehended in the two states in 2025 were greater than they were in 2022; in Montana they were more than double.
The data only includes nine months of the Trump administration. The CBP fiscal year goes from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. Biden administration data includes the first three months of fiscal 2025, nine months of fiscal 2021, and all of fiscal years 2022, 2023 and 2024. Combined, illegal northern border crosser apprehensions totaled roughly one million under the Biden administration, according to CBP data.
The data excludes “gotaways,” the official term used by CBP to describe foreign nationals who illegally enter between ports of entry to evade capture, don’t make immigration claims and don’t return to their country of origin. CBP does not publicly report gotaway data. The Center Square exclusively obtained it from Border Patrol agents. More than two million gotaways were identified by Border Patrol agents under the Biden administration, although the figure is expected to be much higher, The Center Square first reported.
For decades, the northern border has been largely unmanned and unprotected with increased threats of terrorism and lack of operational control, The Center Square reported.
Unlike the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, there is no border wall, significantly less technological equipment exists and far fewer agents are stationed there.
Officials have explained that the data represents a fraction of illegal border crossers – it remains unclear how many really came through largely remote areas where one Border Patrol agent may be responsible for patrolling several hundred miles, The Center Square has reported.
Despite being understaffed and having far less resources, Border Patrol and CBP agents at the U.S.-Canada border apprehended the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) in U.S. history during the Biden administration – 1,216, or 64% of the KSTs apprehended nationwide, The Center Square exclusively reported.
In February, President Donald Trump for the first time in U.S. history declared a national emergency at the northern border, also ordering the U.S. military to implement border security measures there. After shutting down illegal entries at the southwest border, the administration acknowledged the majority of fentanyl and KSTs were coming through the northern border, The Center Square reported.
The Trump administration has also prioritized increased funding, recruitment and hiring and investment in technological capabilities at the northern border.
Daily Caller
Tom Homan Predicts Deportation Of Most Third World Migrants Over Risks From Screening Docs
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
White House border czar Tom Homan predicted Sunday the Trump administration will deport the majority of Third World migrants due to vetting challenges.
Two National Guardsmen were shot Wednesday, allegedly by an Afghan national brought into the U.S. under the Biden administration. The attack prompted President Donald Trump to announce in a Thursday post on Truth Social that his administration would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” Homan said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Third World nations could not be relied upon to provide accurate information for vetting migrants.
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“[T]hese Third World nations, they don’t have systems like we do. So, a lot of these Afghanistans, when they did get here and get vetted, they had no identification at all. Not a single travel document, not one piece of identification,” Homan said. “And we’re going to count on the people that run Afghanistan, the Taliban, to provide us any information [on] who the bad guys were or who the good guys are? Certainly not. And many people need to understand that most terrorists in this world, most of ’em, aren’t in any database.”
“And the same thing with illegal aliens, the over 10 million that came across the border under Joe Biden. There’s no way to vet these people. You think El Salvador or Turkey or Sudan or any of these countries have the databases or system checks that we have?” he added. “Do you think the government[s] of China, Russia, Turkey, do you think they’re going to share that data with us even if they did have it? There’s no way to clearly vet these people 100% that they’re safe to come to this country from these Third World nations.”
The president also wrote in his Thursday post he would “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” along with deporting those who do not offer value to the United States. Homan said Trump is correct to evaluate all migrants who entered under Biden.
“I really, truly think that most of ’em are [going to] end up being deported ’cause we’re not going to be able to properly vet them,” he said.
Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” the Trump administration would deport individuals with pending asylum claims.
West Virginia Army National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, perished Thursday from wounds sustained in Wednesday’s shooting. The other victim, Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition at the time of publication.
The shooting was allegedly carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the country in September 2021 after the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lakanwal previously worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA, and was admitted into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, which resettled Afghans who had helped American forces.
Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024, which the Trump administration granted in April 2025, according to Reuters. The alleged gunman shouted, “Allahu akbar!” before opening fire with a revolver, independent journalist Julio Rojas reported.
As of December 2024, over 180,000 Afghans were resettled in the U.S. following its August 2021 withdrawal, according to the State Department. After the shooting, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals” would be paused “indefinitely.”
USCIS also asserted Thursday it would conduct a full-scale reexamination of all green cards granted to individuals from 19 countries “of concern” at Trump’s direction. The agency added in a later statement that, when vetting migrants from those nations, it would weigh “negative, country specific factors,” such as whether the country was able to “issue secure identity documents.”
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