Foreign gang violence grows in US over Biden’s immigration policies

Nothing illustrates the high price of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies better than the preventable crimes occurring with alarming frequency across the country.

At the border, Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has been detaining thousands of young illegal aliens every week for nearly four years, releasing them almost immediately back into the U.S. interior. It has also admitted a million more on immigration “parole,” under the pretense that they are fleeing persecution in their home countries and will seek asylum. Yet the vast majority are economic migrants who are unlikely to qualify for asylum.

Some of these men have violent criminal histories and affiliations. But what were they? And what were they doing? Since the U.S. government doesn’t have regular access to the criminal records of the countries they come from, no one knows.

In addition to the releases of adults and parolees, more than half a million unaccompanied foreign children have been admitted under the supervision of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. According to Judicial Watch, “the vast majority … are not really children but rather young adults in their teens, and some have criminal histories.” Nearly three-quarters of them are over the age of 14, and two-thirds are male.

The latest example of what all this can do comes from Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver that is a “sanctuary” city within a “sanctuary” state for immigration purposes, making it an ideal environment for foreign criminals to thrive. Venezuelans make up about 40% of the migrants coming to Denver. The nearly 20,000 Venezuelan arrivals since December 2022 provide ample cover for a few dozen or a few hundred thugs to blend in.

In Aurora, members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have reportedly taken over an apartment complex called The Edge at Lowry. According to apartments.com, The Edge is “perfectly located for work or play.” They may want to reconsider.

The Edge was the site of a shooting a few weeks ago, and this clip from local news channel KDVR shows armed men — not law enforcement — walking through the complex this week. Colorado allows “open carry” of firearms for people 18 and older, unless they are convicted felons. But federal law makes it illegal for an alien who is “in the United States illegally or unlawfully” to possess “a firearm or ammunition.”

That ban applies to the millions of illegal aliens DHS has released at the border, as well as the roughly 2 million “runaways” who slipped in undetected. But it’s unclear whether the ban will apply to the million others allowed in under Biden’s trumped-up, legally dubious mass release programs. Paroled aliens are in a kind of legal limbo. They are not “admitted” under immigration law, but the Biden administration has given them the patina of being “lawfully” here until their parole is revoked or their asylum is approved or denied in immigration court.

But I doubt these legal niceties matter much to the boys of Tren de Aragua. They seem to have gained a critical mass at The Edge that gives them control, and they do what they want. Meanwhile, some of the unfortunate other residents of the complex are desperately trying to leave.

A June report estimated that Denver had spent up to $340 million so far on housing, education, health care and other support for the 42,000 released, paroled or other inadmissible aliens who have arrived since 2022. There was $48 million in unpaid care for 16,000 emergency room visits by uninsured illegal aliens. There was $14,000 for each of the 15,725 new students in Denver schools. There were millions more to provide free housing, job training, food and other services through the Denver Asylum Seekers Program. Denver had to cut millions from other programs to pay for it all, including its fire and police departments.

With a population of 713,000, Denver has taken in about one inadmissible immigrant for every 16 residents. In New York, by comparison, it’s more than one for every 45. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has attributed his city’s problems to Texas and geography. “We’re the closest, cheapest bus ticket to El Paso. It’s the cheapest ticket for (Texas) Governor (Greg) Abbott and everybody else to buy, so they just come to Denver,” he told a Denver news station in January. But it’s more likely that the city’s notorious sanctuary policies, generous benefits and lax law enforcement are what draw so many people. Word gets around.

But Denver isn’t alone.

In New York City, organized gang robberies, shootings, intra-immigrant violence, and attacks on police undermine local safety. Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams is doling out millions in shady, non-public contracts for housing, catering, security, and other services for his city’s extralegal immigrant population.

In Philadelphia, where 183 murders have been recorded so far in 2024, an MS-13 gang member from El Salvador, Fredy Antonio Amaya-Marin, recently began shooting at passing cars. He was deported back home in 2007. We don’t know when he returned, but it’s never been easier to sneak across the U.S. border as a “getaway.”

In Chicago, the Standard Club migrant shelter houses Carlos Mavarez Viloria, who has been arrested 10 times since arriving in the U.S. a year ago for theft, drug possession, attempted robbery, trespassing, assaulting police and more. Also living at the Standard is Pedro Izquiel Omana, who was charged with shoplifting from three local stores. But perhaps Chicago’s domestic gang violence is so bad that illegal alien crime goes unnoticed.

Senator Chris Murphy and other Biden administration allies claim that illegal aliens are less likely to commit crimes than native-born immigrants. This claim is based on intellectual sand. First, it confuses legal and illegal immigrants, which are not the same thing. First, legal immigrants must provide a police report from their home country showing whether they have a criminal record in order to obtain a visa, but paroled and undocumented aliens are not. Second, the myth points to FBI crime trackers, to which a third of American cities do not even report their crime statistics. Third, no state except Texas records the immigration status of all accused offenders in criminal proceedings, so all conclusions about the rest are guesswork.

In any case, the American people can see with their own eyes that releasing hundreds of thousands of uncontrolled young men into the country is a high-risk gamble. It’s important to remember that when you hear about the supposedly great bipartisan border bill that the Senate defeated this year. Democrats continue to tout this bill when they talk about trying to fix the border as we approach November.

The Senate bill bore no resemblance to H.R. 2, which passed the House in 2023 and would have strengthened border security and ended the government’s ability to release and parole inadmissible aliens. But the unacceptably weak Senate bill would have permanently institutionalized that practice, through both border releases and parole, allowing nearly two million more inadmissible aliens with unknown histories into the United States each year.

The border line is a weekly Daily Signal column that investigates everything from the unknown illegal immigration crisis at the border to the impact of immigration on cities and states across the country. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism and more.

Read other BorderLine columns:

The Biden Administration’s Latest Illegal Immigration Fraud

How ruling elites continue to suppress debate on immigration policy

New Jersey city prioritizes protecting illegal aliens from ICE over public safety

A successful US immigration policy would send Venezuelans home to rebuild their country

Here’s the chart on illegal immigration that Trump was talking about when he was shot