United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joseph Edlow told Breitbart News that former President Joe Biden prioritized illegal aliens so much that the nation’s legal immigration system was left “a complete and utter mess.”
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Edlow detailed how the Biden administration, with former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and former USCIS Director Ur Jaddou at the helm, gave priority to illegal aliens to enter the U.S. over legal immigrants already in the country looking to secure green cards after decades of waiting.
“What is the impact and the ramifications of the last four years of Biden administration? It’s left the legal immigration system as a complete and utter mess,” Edlow told Breitbart News.
“There are far too many cases pending, there are far too many people who have legitimate claims and legitimate applicants that have been waiting forever, and these are people that we want,” Edlow continued. “These are the people that America needs in this country that are waiting to get their status whereby we have prioritized the parole, the illegal parole programs that were set up by the Biden administration, that were conducted with such a degree of lack of care, for fraud and for integrity.”
In some cases, Edlow revealed, migrants used dead people as their sponsors to get through Biden’s parole pipeline and into the U.S. — a revelation that the director says had to have been known to prior administration officials but went seemingly unchecked.
Indeed, as Breitbart News reported at the time, Biden’s parole pipeline eventually became so full of fraud that DHS temporarily shut down the program before starting it back up. Investigations found that single sponsors were being used for several hundred migrants to get into the U.S. and nonexistent zip codes had been put down as the addresses of sponsors helping migrants get in.
“It’s things like that that we’ve uncovered. And I’m so thankful that we have a president now that has given us the keys back to the kingdom so that we can restore the integrity, that we can ultimately get rid of these parole programs and start to unravel that mess,” Edlow said.
The goal of the Biden administration, Edlow said, seemed to be getting as many illegal aliens into the nation’s interior as possible. Because it was an unpopular goal, though, Edlow said the administration used the parole pipeline to hide the true numbers of migrants coming in.
Border Patrol agents process migrants who entered the U.S. illegally the day before, before taking them to a port of entry in Jacumba, California, December 6, 2023. (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)
“The priority was the illegal population, and furthering that act of getting more illegals in, not necessarily through the border, once they realized that wasn’t popular, but using these parole programs to drive down, falsely, drive down the border numbers, but get just as many, if not more migrants into the country and using them,” Edlow said.
Under Biden, Mayorkas would routinely claim that border crossings were down even as he knew the administration’s parole pipeline was admitting hundreds of thousands of migrants with no legal status to be in the U.S.
The corporate media, seemingly in lockstep with the Biden administration, repeated the claim. In July 2024, for example, the New York Times published a piece titled “Biden Finally Got Border Numbers Down. Will He See the Political Benefits?”
In actuality, by July of that year, Biden’s parole pipeline had welcomed almost 1.2 million migrants to the U.S. through commercial flights and Ports of Entry.
Edlow called the current legal immigration system “a huge knot” that needs unraveling, ensuring that USCIS adjudicators are not simply trying to “get to yes” with a migrant’s application — as he hinted the Biden administration did.
“I’m not looking for a ‘get to yes.’ I’m not necessarily looking for a ‘get to no,’” Edlow said. “I’m looking to get to the right answer based on the facts that are available.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.