At the Otay Mesa port of entry in San Diego, California illegal immigrants falsely claimed "credible fear " to be allowed to receive asylum in the United States. These illegals were coached to make the claim by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and, even though Customs and Border Protection (CBP) know about the scam, they have to allow illegal aliens to stay, anyway. Note: the picture above is of a recent NITA protest at the Otay Mesa port of entry.
CBP Documents released to Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request exposing both the scam and knowledge of the scam by the people charged with enforcing the border.
In the middle of 2014, NIYA executed this scam to bring 250 illegal aliens into the U.S. They coached the illegals to falsely claim that they had a “credible fear” of returning to their native country. Foreigners can claim asylum under five categories, based on fear of persecution over race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership in a specific social group.
One of the Judicial Watch documents reads:
“BACKGROUND: The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NITA) activists have coordinated previous demonstrations along the Southwest Border (Laredo, Texas and Nogales, Arizona). During this iteration, NIYA seek to bring 250 people to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry where they will request entry to the U.S. Previous CBP reporting of these events indicate the individuals applying for entry will have no entitlements to enter, pass through or remain in the United States and will summarily claim Credible Fear (CF).”
What's more, this is not a new scam. An August 2013 Judicial Watch report said the same type of scam was used to allow droves of illegal aliens to flood the same Otay crossing by claiming “credible fear” of Mexican drug cartels. The report quoted a Border Patrol agent saying, “They are being told if they come across, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they will be allowed into the country.”
Judicial Watch adds:
Credible fear asylum in the U.S. has become so popular that illegal aliens are hearing about it on Facebook and federal immigration authorities are overwhelmed with applications. In the last few years the number of foreigners, including large numbers from terrorist countries, asserting credible fear to gain asylum in this country has skyrocketed. During congressional testimony a few years ago, the heads of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP confirmed that the percentage of individuals expressing a fear to remain in the U.S. has risen tremendously in the last few years.
The difficulties are compounded when the number of asylum applications is increasing.The total number of affirmative asylum applications has more than doubled in five years, exceeding 80,000 in FY2013. Over the same five years, so-called "credible fear" asylum applications made at the border have increased sevenfold, from less than 5,000 to more than 36,000 in FY2013. Statistics from USCIS Asylum Division show an approval rate of 92 percent for credible fear claims in FY 2013. Those statistics were compiled before the 2014 border surge.
The AP reported on Nov. 19th that, after the first step in the asylum process, the immigrants are often released from custody to await a court hearing. Currently, a backlog of more than 450,000 cases is pending in federal immigration courts.
Most polls indicate that the majority of Americans are justifiably fearful of allowing 10,000 poorly vetted Syrian refugees into the country - now, they can add to that 450,000 immigrants who received little or no vetting, some of whom falsely claimed "credible fear." Most of them may be perfectly harmless, but in the end, it only takes one terrorist to kill dozens of Americans.