CBP is withholding from the Center the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed.
Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app. (See links to prior CIS reports at the end of this post.)
But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”
Now, though, CIS’s litigation has yielded a novel and newsworthy answer from the government: The public can’t know the receiving airports because those hundreds of thousands of CBP-authorized arrivals have created such “operational vulnerabilities” at airports that “bad actors” could undermine law enforcement efforts to “secure the United States border” if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry.
In short, the Biden administration’s legally dubious program to fly inadmissible aliens over the border and directly to U.S. airports has allegedly created law enforcement vulnerabilities too grave to release publicly, lest “bad actors” take advantage of them to inflict harm on public safety. Or, more specifically, here’s how CBP’s lawyers, in email communications with CIS and summarized in a CIS Joint Status Filing, characterized FOIA’s law enforcement exception (b)(7)(E) in explaining their refusal to release just the domestic U.S. airport locations:
Exception (b)(7)(E) has been applied to the identifying information for air ports of entry, which, if disclosed would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended at particular airports which would, either standing alone or combined with other information, reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures, thereby undermining CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders.
By Todd Bensman
