The Biden-Harris administration has authorized massive overtime so Department of Homeland Security agents can grant temporary status to as many illegal immigrants as possible before a new president is inaugurated, a Homeland Security agent told The Daily Wire.
“Jason” — an alias given to the agent, who spoke to The Daily Wire on the condition of anonymity, said supervisors have told workers in recent weeks that they should aim to clear the backlog of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) applications within 120 days. Doing so would allow these illegal immigrants to live and work in the country, and shield them from deportation for two years. The department is offering 30 hours of overtime per pay period to expedite processing of the immigrants, who come from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, and Lebanon.
The Department of Homeland Security would not confirm or deny the allegation, or explain its motives. But the unprecedented number of TPS applicants — and the mandate to process them quickly — has put pressure on agents to approve applicants rather than investigate them further or deny them, Jason said.
“It’s much easier to approve a case than to deny a case,” he told The Daily Wire. “Denying it comes with a lot of writing and approvals from supervisors.”
The Biden administration insists that those approved for TPS status have been vetted. But Jason said vetting is really just box checking — literally. Jason said he wakes up in the morning, shuffles into his living room, and begins clicking buttons to approve the migrants each day, sometimes working late into the night to accrue overtime hours.
“I just think the general public should know: I couldn’t tell you if the people we are approving are criminals or not, theres no way to know unless they admit to it,” he said. “The U.S. government isn’t calling up Haiti and saying is this person a criminal?”
Illegal immigrants who have been granted TPS are largely vetted by government agents who work from home, never talk to the applicants, and often simply check to see whether the applicant admitted to committing crimes. There is no opportunity to ask applicants follow-up questions, evaluate their mannerisms for suspicious activity, or hear a story first-hand to assess for credibility.
“I don’t see these people face-to-face, not once. It’s just, you put ‘no’ to everything — you didn’t say you murdered anyone in your home country — you were here on these dates? Okay, approved,” Jason said.
According to DHS data covering the nine months between October 2023 and June 2024, 98% of processed applicants were approved, while only 2% were denied. Remaining pending were 344,000 cases, mostly from Venezuela.
TPS applicants must fill out Form I-821, which asks them if they have ever been arrested, and to provide their own court records showing the offense if so. It also has them check “yes” or “no” to 41 questions such as if they have ever committed “Any particularly serious crime committed either in our outside the United States”’; if they have ever “participated in the persecution of any person on account of race”; and if they are “now engaged in activities that could be reasonable grounds for concluding that you are a danger to the security of the United States.”
The form also asks if applicants are “now trafficking in any controlled substance,” whether they plan to “violate any law of the United States relating to espionage,” and if they have ever been involved in “killing any person.”
“I’ve never denied someone because they put yes on a criminal question,” Jason said. “They don’t do that.”
TPS status is restricted to migrants originally from one of 16 eligible countries, which the United States government have deemed unsafe for migrants to return to.
Republicans say the list has outgrown its intended purpose. In June 2024, Rep. Thomas Tiffany (R-WI) said El Salvador, which was added to the TPS list in light of a 2001 earthquake, was still on the list.
“The T in TPS stands for temporary,” said Tiffany, who moved unsuccessfully to rescind El Salvador’s TPS designation. “TPS was never intended to operate to provide rolling amnesty for hundreds of thousands of nationals.”
Last month, DHS said it plans to add some 11,000 illegal immigrants from Lebanon — the country from which Hezbollah has launched attacks on Israel — to the list.
Further complicating matters, many of the Haitians coming to the United States were already living safely in third countries, and are coming to the United States from places like Chile. Policies require them to attest that they have not been offered legal status in those countries.
TPS eligibility also requires applicants to have arrived in the United States before a particular date and not left it since. But supervisors have told workers to sit on, rather than deny, the applications of people who came to the country too recently, in anticipation of the cutoff date being moved forward, Jason said — something that has repeatedly occurred.
Before applying, applicants also must go to a local center to have their picture, fingerprints, and signature taken. Those — along with their names and any aliases they provide — are fed into an FBI criminal background check system when the application is later submitted. But the FBI background check only searches the United States, not the countries where the applicants spent most of their lives, Jason said.
The cutoff date for Haitians seeking TPS is currently June 3, 2024, meaning a criminal background check in the United States could capture almost no time of actual residence. The notion that the dates will repeatedly be extended also serves as an incentive to illegally immigrate on the assumption that they may eventually become eligible for TPS.
DHS spokeswoman Katherine Belcher told The Daily Wire that “Noncitizens who have been convicted of any felony or two or more misdemeanors committed in the United States are not eligible for TPS. Noncitizens who have participated in the persecution of another individual or engaged in or incited terrorist activity are not eligible for TPS.”
She did not respond to questions about how the self-reported answers are verified, whether the criminal background check includes arrests in other countries, and what happens if a TPS applicant is denied due to finding that he is a criminal: whether he is located and removed from the country, or simply allowed to keep living here without temporary protective status.
Jason said he has almost never seen a case where someone is denied based on the answers they provide. Instead, denials typically come when people don’t fill out the form completely, and don’t respond to a followup letter asking them to fill in the remaining questions, called “abandonment denials.”
He said that President Joe Biden’s transformation of TPS has blurred the line between legal immigration, which most Americans support, and illegal immigration, which most oppose.
“They come here illegally, that’s the point of TPS — it’s not really a status, it’s like a weird middle ground where they wont be kicked out and they can get a work authorization card,” he said.
Jason said the DHS agents typically signed up for the job to enforce the law, and being enlisted to instead work from home shielding illegal immigrants from deportation has drained morale. He said it will be virtually impossible to locate and remove the sheer number of TPS grantees after their two-year term is up.
“I think the American people have a right to know that we’re letting a bunch of people in without even having interviews with them,” Jason said.
Related: DOJ Searched For Anti-Haitian Incidents to Bolster Kamala’s Claims, Emails Show
