Biden-Harris have done everything possible to protect criminal migrants from deportation

When the Biden-Harris administration took office, it promised to focus immigration enforcement on criminal aliens rather than “regular” 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 list who are not in the agency’s custody. Some are probably in state or local prisons, but hundreds of thousands are walking our streets.

Is anyone surprised?

Remember, this is the government that announced a 100-day moratorium on all deportations – criminals, terrorists, everyone – on the day it took office.

Things haven’t gotten much better since then.

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% decrease in the number of notifications from ICE to local police officers to detain criminal aliens arrested on local charges – so-called “detainers.”
• A 57% decrease in the number of criminal aliens arrested compared to the first three Trump years.
• And the number of criminals actually deported fell by a whopping 67%.

Do you have the idea?

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — who was impeached by the House of Representatives for such shenanigans — released a memo handcuffing ICE agents shortly after Biden’s appointment.

The memo states that only certain illegal immigrants may be targeted for law enforcement, including, to be fair, those who have committed “serious criminal conduct” (although candidate Joe Biden has said drunk driving is not a serious crime ).

But before an ICE agent can even interview an illegal alien, the memo requires that he determine whether there are “mitigating” factors, including the alien’s age, whether he is supporting a family and whether he has “a mental illness that qualifies possibly lead to this.” contributed to the criminal behavior.”

The obvious aim is to make it more difficult to actually enforce the law.

Another reason there are known criminal aliens on the streets is that the Biden-Harris DHS is firmly opposed to arresting illegal immigrants in the first place because that is the only way to ensure they actually leave.

The average daily number of deportable migrants in ICE custody fell by nearly half from 2019 to 2023, despite Congress increasing funding.

This is consistent with the fact that Harris authored or sponsored several bills during his Senate tenure that would have gutted ICE detention.

ICE’s letter with the new data blames sanctuary policies that “can end up shielding dangerous criminals who often prey on the same communities.”

That’s great coming from an administration that has turned the entire country into a haven for illegal immigrants and has done nothing to reverse state and local sanctuary policies.

Safeguards policy is a real problem regardless of who is in the White House. The point of sanctuary cities is to protect foreign criminals because the only people involved are those arrested for a state or local crime and whose fingerprints on ICE’s computers provide a red flag.

And because criminal aliens are disproportionately concentrated in sanctuary cities and states, ICE needs more time and manpower to track them down than simply extradite them when local law enforcement is done with them.

The Trump administration tried to curb sanctuary cities by denying funding to certain law enforcement purposes if local officials didn’t cooperate. They were met with the usual complaints, but they made progress.

The Biden-Harris administration doesn’t go beyond asking, “Please, would you cooperate?” It can’t even bring itself to send strongly worded letters.

Another reason some of these hundreds of thousands of known deportable criminal aliens are on our streets is that some countries are refusing to allow the return of their own citizens or are moving slowly.

Known as “recalcitrant countries,” they pose a real challenge to any government seeking to protect Americans. There are more than 1 million people (criminals or not) with “final deportation orders” – they’ve had their day in court, been deported but are still here, and some come from these countries, including major countries like China and India.

But Congress has provided a tool to put pressure on such countries. The State Department may simply stop issuing visas to some or all applicants in a country that does not readmit its own citizens. The Bush and Obama administrations used this power only once against tiny countries. Trump used it much more extensively and got results.

How many times has the Biden-Harris administration used the threat of a visa freeze to send criminal aliens back to where they came from?

Zero.

Vice President Harris recently hosted a photo op at the Arizona border and promised to crack down on illegal immigration. (Stop laughing.)

Even if that were true, what about the hundreds of thousands of known criminal aliens who ICE says are now walking our streets?

Harris didn’t even act like he cared.

Instead, she summarized her actions at an event in 2018, fortunately captured on video, where she joined protesters in chanting “Down, down with deportation!”

If you don’t deport criminal aliens, you’ll end up living next to them. Hundreds of thousands of them.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.