REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
When the Biden-Harris administration took office, they pledged to focus immigration enforcement on criminal aliens, rather than on “ordinary” illegal immigrants.
The result? More criminal migrants than ever before!
ICE recently released data showing that there are more than 600,000 foreign criminals on ICE’s docket who are not in the agency’s custody. Some are probably in state or local jails, but hundreds of thousands are walking our streets.
Is anyone surprised?
Remember, this is the administration that announced a 100-day moratorium on all deportations — criminals, terrorists, anybody — the day it took office.
It hasn’t gotten much better since.
My colleague Jon Feere, a former ICE chief of staff, compared criminal deportations in the first three years of this administration and the previous one. The results are sobering. Under Biden-Harris:
- A 44% drop in the number of notifications by ICE to local cops to hold criminal aliens arrested in local charges — called “detainers.”
- A 57% drop in the number of criminal aliens arrested compared to the first three Trump years.
- And a whopping 67% drop in the number of criminals actually deported.
Getting the idea?
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — who was impeached by the House of Representatives for shenanigans like this — issued a memo shortly after Biden appointed him that handcuffs ICE agents.
The memo said only certain illegal immigrants may be targeted for enforcement, including, to be fair, those engaged in “serious criminal conduct” (though candidate Joe Biden said drunk driving was not a serious crime).
But before an ICE agent is even allowed to question an illegal alien, the memo requires that he determine whether there are any “mitigating” factors, including the alien’s age, whether he supports a family, and whether he has “a mental condition that may have contributed to the criminal conduct.”
The obvious goal is to make it too hard to actually enforce the law.
Another reason for known criminal aliens walking the streets is that the Biden-Harris DHS is strongly opposed to detaining any illegal immigrants at all, which is the only way to make sure they actually leave.
The average daily number of deportable migrants in ICE detention fell by almost half from 2019 to 2023, even though Congress has increased funding.
This is consistent with Harris’s writing or backing multiple bills while in the Senate that would have gutted ICE detention.
The letter from ICE with the new data blamed sanctuary policies that “can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities.”
This is rich coming from an administration which has made the whole country a sanctuary for illegal immigrants and which has done nothing to try to get state and local sanctuary policies reversed.
Sanctuary policies are a genuine problem regardless of who’s in the White House. The whole point of sanctuaries is to protect foreign criminals, since the only people involved are those arrested for a state or local crime whose fingerprints raise a red flag on ICE’s computers.
And since criminal aliens are disproportionately concentrated in sanctuary cities and states, it takes more ICE time and manpower to track them down, rather than just have them handed over when local law enforcement is done with them.
The Trump administration tried to rein in sanctuaries by denying certain law enforcement-related funding if local officials didn’t play ball. They were fought with the usual lawsuits, but they made progress.
The Biden-Harris administration doesn’t go beyond asking, pretty-please, will you cooperate? It can’t even bring itself to send sternly worded letters.
Another reason some of these hundreds of thousands of known, deportable criminal aliens are on our streets is that some countries refuse or slow-walk the return of their own citizens.
They’re known as “recalcitrant countries” and present a real challenge to any administration that wants to protect Americans. There are more than 1 million people (criminals or not) with “final orders of removal” — they’ve had their day in court, been ordered deported, but are still here, and some are from these countries, which include big ones like China and India.
But Congress has provided a tool to apply pressure to such countries. The State Department can simply stop issuing visas to some or all applicants in a country that isn’t accepting back its own citizens. The Bush and Obama administrations used this power only one time each, against tiny countries. Trump made much wider use of it, and got results.
How many times has the Biden-Harris administration used the threat of a visa cut-off to help ship criminal aliens back where they came from?
Zero.
Vice President Harris staged a photo-op at the Arizona border the other day and pledged to crack down on illegal immigration. (Stop laughing.)
Even if this were true, what about the hundreds of thousands of known criminal aliens ICE has now admitted are walking our streets?
Harris hasn’t even pretended to care about that.
Instead, she summarized her approach at a 2018 event, luckily captured on video, where she joined protesters in chanting “Down, down with deportation!”
If you don’t deport criminal aliens, you end up living next door to them. Hundreds of thousands of them.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.