More than 75% of the 473,682 people who illegally crossed the southern border into the United States as part of a family during fiscal 2019 did not seek asylum and were simply released into the country without the legal justification that they need to be here to avoid danger

Senior Homeland Security officials who appeared before a Senate committee Wednesday said only 105,000 of those arrested on the southern border in fiscal 2019 claimed they had a “credible fear” of returning to their home country, far fewer than expected. It's an indication migrants believe they can enter illegally and successfully remain without having to present a legitimate reason for doing so.

“The bottom line is we literally let hundreds of thousands of people in, and they didn’t even have to claim credible fear,” said Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday.

"That’s correct," said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

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The result was the large majority of families who illegally crossed the border are now illegally present in the U.S.

"That is pretty noteworthy. I mean, I want people to understand that. We just let people in. They didn’t even have to claim that unbelievably low standard , " Johnson said.

Migrants who cite a credible fear of being sent back to their home country cannot be deported until their asylum case is resolved.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he was surprised so few families tried to claim asylum. “You’d expect perhaps to see the numbers matching, at least the families,” he said. “I don’t have an answer as to why they don’t.”

A person who trespasses into the country will be returned to their country unless it is a child who arrived without an adult. Unaccompanied children made up 76,000 of the 850,000 total unauthorized crossings, including those who didn't cross as part of families, last year. More than 301,000 of the total were single adults.

Due to the number of families arriving — fiscal 2019 saw the most families in all of Border Patrol’s 94-year history — federal agencies did not have the space or the legal authority to hold them all.

Those arrested are supposed to be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement within three days. ICE has 2,500 family beds, leaving a massive shortage compared to the number of families needing to be transferred to ICE. Due to the shortage, the Border Patrol released an undisclosed number into the U.S., often dropping migrants off at nearby bus stations or sending them out the station’s backdoor.

Morgan said even if ICE had the beds, the agency is only allowed to hold a family 20 days before they must be released into the U.S., per a judge’s ruling in 2015.

"There’s not enough time to do the proper vetting that we need to do to complete that process, so we have to release them," Morgan said.

The Executive Office of Immigration Review Director James McHenry said he assigned up to 250 officers to handle southern border cases, and they did not get through all of them.