Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told Newsmax Wednesday that a recent press release from Customs and Border Patrol about an upcoming enforcement operation is "the most bizarre thing I've ever heard of."
"Border patrol officials that I have talked to, that I've heard, are beside themselves," Wolf said during an appearance on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officials are beside themselves that the administration would announce this in advance. You usually announce the results of an enforcement operation; you don't announce that it's going to start. You're tipping off all the different subjects that you are targeting and would like to remove, so it's a bizarre way to do this."
"I think it goes to a larger point that this administration really doesn't believe in immigration enforcement," he continued. "They do everything they can to undermine that. I think this is the latest example of that."
Title 42, the Trump-era health policy used to rapidly expel migrants more than 2.8 million times, expires at midnight Thursday. Wolf said it's expected that the southern border will "see another surge" of migrants at that time.
"You're going to see a variety of individuals, mainly single adults, coming across that border because those are the individuals that have been returned under Title 42 for the past several years," he said. "Now, those individuals will be put in Title 8 removal proceedings, and all that means really, under the Biden administration, is that the vast majority will be released into American communities."
"So, about 50,000 a month have been returned under Title 42," he continued. "There's another 50,000 that will be released every month, again, into American communities. That's on top of the 100,000 or so that are being released every month already. So, as bad as it's been over the past two years, it's about to get worse."
When asked about President Joe Biden's stated intention to veto a House GOP border security bill, Wolf said, "That leadership has been absent for 2 1/2 years so this is nothing new, unfortunately."
"I would say that the DHS secretary, the president, the vice president, they have no solutions," he said. "They continue to talk about a plan. I think they're even saying that that it'll be chaos at the border. Well, no kidding. I mean, we've known this for two years. You've had two years to plan for Title 42 expiring."
"The border doesn't have to be in chaos, if you plan appropriately, and you put the right policies in place," Wolf continued. "So this idea that there's nothing we can do, it's almost like they're bystanders in this crisis. No, you actually control it. You manage it and you can solve it and they're not doing any of the above."
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