Airports in major cities across the US were forced by the Biden administration to house scores of migrants during the border crisis despite safety risks, a bombshell report from the Senate Commerce Committee has alleged. 

Senate investigators concluded that the Democratic White House’s actions made flying less safe due to a lack of migrant vetting and diverting critical resources intended to keep air travel secure, the 47-page “Flight Risk” report revealed. 

“The Biden-Harris administration made airports and aviation less secure by allowing and encouraging aliens to shelter at U.S. airports, by allowing improperly vetted aliens to fly into and throughout the United States,and by diverting needed federal air marshals to the border to address the border crisis the Biden-Harris administration had created,” the report concluded. 

At least 11 hubs, including Chicago O’Hare, New York’s JFK, and Boston Logan faced pressure to temporarily house hundreds of migrants in their facilities — including auxiliary buildings and plane hangars. 

In many cases, the airports began hosting the migrants in 2023 after a surge of humanity across the US-Mexico border and the establishment of the so-called CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) parole programs.

Privately, officials raised concerns about the Biden administration’s push. 

“We have received a request from the WH to determine if there are available facilities on airport or surrounding areas… This is an immediate ask so please prioritize this effort,” a Federal Aviation Administration official wrote in an Oct. 6, 2023, missive to Massport, which runs Logan, per the report. 

“Yikes, this is definitely Fox News fodder in the making,” a Department of Transportation bluntly responded. 

Massport responded to DOT officials by warning: “We are not designed or resourced to manage the intake of migrant populations.”

“[It] will create a host of unintended safety and security consequences if we were to also become a migrant intake facility while simultaneously operating New England’s largest commercial service airport.”

Biden administration officials waved off those concerns. At its peak, Logan held up to 352 migrants overnight in Terminal E, causing Massport to shell out $779,000 in “supplemental public safety, transportation, and janitorial services expenses.” Out in Chicago, conditions were a more dramatic, with authorities fielding 

329 service calls and arresting more than two dozen migrants on charges of disorderly conduct, theft, and other offenses between April 2023 and February 2024.

At the peak of the crisis, an estimated 900 migrants were sheltered at a shuttle terminal in O’Hare. 
At JFK in Feburary 2024, a migrant from Ecuador bolted past a security post into “‘the secure area …’ toward two runways.” The suspect, Kleber Loor-Ponce, was found with scissors and a box cutter after security caught up to him. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration dispatched air marshals, who are tasked with blending in with travelers on flights to combat terrorism and criminal activity, to the southwestern border.

“TSA confirmed that, between May 20, 2019, and December 11, 2023, it deployed 1,323 federal air marshals—a substantial percentage of all air marshals—to the southern border in response to CBP’s [Customs and Border Patrol] request,” the report revealed. 

“While TSA previously deployed some air marshals in 2019 (443 total) to assist with border enforcement, deployments picked up substantially in the Biden-Harris administration beginning in May 2022.”

Besides housing and border support operations, the Biden administration tapped into other DOT agencies for assistance with other migrant related support. 

This includes requests that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) team up with states to find bus companies to transport migrants, directing FMCSA to develop a “Know your rights” pamphlet for passengers, and calling on the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to find federal grants to move migrants. 

“Instead of focusing on safety and security, the Biden-Harris administration adopted a dangerous and ill-prepared open-border policy that put American airports and travelers at risk,” the Senate Commerce Committee report concluded. 

“Wittingly or not, the administration created a crisis, as a massive surge of migrants flooded the border and major airports, and then were released into the country without proper vetting.”