Border Patrol agents in Southern California are reportedly under orders to release “single adults” immigrating to the U.S. from the Eastern Hemisphere and classify them as “hard” or “very hard” to remove.

A memo sent to Border Patrol agents working in the San Diego sector, which has become a top illegal immigrant crossing, instructs officials to process and release single adults into the U.S. interior as NTA/OR, short for Notice to Appear/Release on Own Recognizance. The memo applies to all countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, which number more than 100, except for six: Uzbekistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Georgia, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan, according to Fox News.

NEW: @FoxNews has obtained an internal Border Patrol memo sent to agents in San Diego sector after President Biden’s executive order took effect, instructing them to release single adults from all but six countries in the eastern hemisphere & classifying them as “hard” or “very… pic.twitter.com/OaSLSYbuC1

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 9, 2024

Aspects of the memo were first reported by The Washington Examiner. Last week, a senior Biden administration official told reporters that the government was making progress on managing immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere and expecting further advancement, a message contradicted by the memo pushed out to San Diego Sector immigration authorities.

“Extra-hemispheric migrants have always been a challenge. They will be subject to these rules, provisions,” the official told reporters last week, according to the Examiner. “We’ve also been working with governments all over the world to enhance our ability to repatriate individuals to countries that have historically been challenging. We have, for example, operated repatriation flights to India, to China, to Uzbekistan, to Mauritania, to Senegal over the last few months, and those are all countries that historically would have been much more challenging for us to return individuals to and we anticipate we will continue to enhance our ability to return migrants to the Eastern Hemisphere.”

“So, we do think that the rules measures will allow us to impose an immediate and fast consequence to migrants no matter what country they’re coming from,” the same official said.

The number of immigrants crossing into the U.S. through the San Diego Sector has exploded recently to numbers not seen in the region since the 1990s when immigration roiled state politics. In April alone, 37,370 people crossed illegally into the U.S. through the sector. Immigrants from 98 different countries came through the sector.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP

The rise in San Diego Sector immigration comes as Texas has taken steps on the state level to reduce illegal immigration into the state, measures that have been fought by the Biden administration. Republicans in Arizona are looking at similar steps, though the state is governed by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

The memo to San Diego Border Patrol was revealed after President Joe Biden signed an executive order last week in a move the administration said would crack down on illegal immigration. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott said over the weekend that the order has done nothing to slow immigration into the country.

“There’s no slowing down of people crossing the border. In fact, it’s just accelerating. This is gaslighting our fellow Americans. When Biden gets up and says, ‘This is going to stop people from coming across the border,’ when he says, ‘It’s going to secure the border,’ in fact, it is making illegal border crossings worse,” Abbott said, according to Fox News.