The Biden administration’s top border official declined to confirm that migrants who come over the southern border illegally are being vetted by federal law enforcement before being released into the United States.

In exchanges with Republican congressmen at a House Appropriations Committee hearing Tuesday morning, acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Troy Miller stopped short of quelling lawmakers’ concerns that federal police were not just taking the migrants’ word on their identities before letting them go.

“If an individual comes into the country with no form of identification, and they just give a name and they give a birth date — that unless you can disprove that that’s who they are that they’re admitted into the country, is that still the way business is conducted?” Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) asked during the CBP budget hearing.

“I can confidently say we’re doing our best to identify every single individual coming into this country and vet them through the appropriate systems,” Miller said.

Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) fired back at Miller and pointed to how a man in his Jacksonville, Florida, district was killed by a 24-year-old Honduran illegal immigrant who lied and claimed to be 17 years old when he crossed the border in 2021 yet was released into the country despite allegedly being vetted by Border Patrol.

“I had a constituent killed by an individual who came across and was not identified. Yet he was released to the interior of the country,” Rutherford said. “I keep trying to get a better handle on how CBP and ICE are actually handling the vetting process. … Let’s say this individual is not in any system that you have. There’s no biometrics on them. No ID, no documents. How does CBP handle that person?”

Miller listed agreements with an unspecified number of countries in South and Central America that enable information-sharing between countries, including biometric data (such as fingerprints and facial scans) and biographical information that are collected as migrants pass through each country.

“When they enter in between the ports of entry … we will do our complete suite of checks against law enforcement databases, intelligence databases, our databases, and ultimately, it is our goal to remove individuals quickly that don’t have an asylum claim,” he said.

“There’s nothing there!” Rutherford replied. “You can look at all your systems. You can process them all you want — there’s nothing there. So you don’t know who this individual is. What are you going to do with it?”

“We do not have long-term detention capabilities in Customs and Border Protection nor should we,” Miller said.

“So you’re telling me these individuals are going to be detained,” Rutherford said.

“I said that’s my preference,” Miller clarified. “My preference is that they are detained. If we do not have the capacity to detain them, we cannot.”

Rutherford asked why the Department of Homeland Security budget and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in particular, had not increased the number of beds available to detain illegal immigrants coming over the border with no identification and whose identity cannot be verified. Miller said he could not speak for the DHS or ICE.

Instead, Miller said those immigrants are let into the country, sometimes tracked through an app on a cellphone or with an ankle monitor.

Harris asked a hypothetical question about a person from Iran, a country that does not share criminal history or citizenship data with the U.S., thus making it impossible for border officials to vet migrants traveling from there.

“I’m assuming we don’t have access to their databases, we don’t have access to their biometrics,” Harris said. “If no red flags come up on that individual somewhere, that person will be admitted into the interior.”

“He or she will not be admitted into the country,” Miller pushed back.

“With no red flags — I mean, no red flags come up anywhere … from all this information-sharing. So we’re not admitting people into the interior who don’t have identification?” Harris asked.

“Admit would be the wrong terminology. We could release somebody with a Notice to Appear,” Miller said, referring to the U.S. immigration document that orders the migrant to appear in court months to years in the future.

Miller is a three-decade federal law enforcement officer who has been in his position as the top official of the 60,000-employee CBP agency since early 2021 due to the Biden administration’s inability to clear a nominee through the Senate.