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The ICE Fiscal Year 2021 Report is available and the information in it is stunning. Under Biden’s watch, ICE is effectively abolished.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.
Jason:
hello and welcome back to another episode of FAIR’s Understanding Immigration podcast this is Jason Peña one of FAIR’s researchers and today I’m joined by Preston Huennekens FAIR’s government relations manager today we're going to discuss the much-awaited report by U.S. immigration and customs enforcement also known as ICE one of ICE’s responsibilities is enforcing federal immigration law across the interior united states such as conducting deportations of illegal aliens as such as required by congress they are required to produce a report of their activities of the previous fiscal year however after a five-month delay in releasing this report FAIR discovered that immigration enforcement under the Biden administration has plummeted Preston I want to take this over to you was this reported as our own report here at FAIR was it as bad as we predicted when we did our preliminary write-up last month
Preston:
yes it was just as bad and it really confirms what we've known for a long time now which is that ICE CBP and border patrol all of these organizations are really held back by the policies that have been put in place by the byte administration and ICE now releasing their removal report really shows that administrative arrests have drastically declined by 28% from those that were made in the previous fiscal year and removals have absolutely plummeted and for those of our listeners at home removals is simply another word for deportation so that's what we're talking about when we say removals we only removed about 59,000 people compared to in fiscal year 2020 when we removed over 185,000 and I want to mention that most of those removals that we had in this fiscal year so that 59 thousand only over 30,000 of those were actually during the final months of the trump administration because the fiscal year runs from September to October so there's a there's a bit of an overlap of a couple of months where trump and his political appointees were still in control of ICE and in control of the policy there and this is just gonna have you know the we already know it's having an impact on the united states we know people on the ground in the border states and in larger cities where illegal aliens are flocking to you know we're seeing the consequences of this we're seeing the impact on crime we're seeing the impact on housing for these people where you have you have tens of thousands of people that are in the united states they're removable they're not going anywhere and this really shows that under president Biden and under DHS secretary Alexandro Mayorkas immigration enforcement has been eviscerated in this country
Jason:
absolutely Preston I want to go into detail a little bit about some of the statistics that are that were highlighted in the report well maybe not highlighted but we here at FAIR highlighted so when we look at some serious felony offenses we see that the apprehensions of criminal aliens that have these certain convictions have plummeted since fy 2020. now keep in mind Preston and to our audience as well in fy 2020 ICE was hampered because of the covid 19 pandemic so it did change and stymie their operations but nonetheless they were able to get the job done of remote identifying and removing illegal aliens from the united states but when we look at the stats here in fy 2021 we see an 18% decrease in homicide-related arrests of criminal aliens we see a 22% decline for illegal aliens with sexual assault offenses a 47% decline for assault-related arrests 28% for robberies and 35% for kidnapping so clearly despite the bite administration and Alexandro Mayorkas saying oh we're refocusing our priorities to tailor to very serious criminal aliens who have committed egregious offenses but even when we look at the numbers we're seeing that even in like in these very serious offenses that should not be taken lightly even in those arenas they've declined moreover one going through the report I noticed that there was no mention of the 16,000 plus criminal aliens that they released back onto America’s streets I don't know if you remember in the report we highlighted that figure should probably go without saying why they don't want to highlight that that data point I also want to talk about or also bring up the I guess the general transparency about immigration enforcement so one of the operations that they highlighted was operation soar and it was it was a sting that essentially targeted illegal alien sex offenders and while we here have no issue with those wide skill enforcement operations targeting criminal aliens it seems that was the only operation that they conducted to that we know of that scale when we look at ICE’s so when we look at the other component of ICE homeland security investigations or HSI we see that there are three or four operations that they're bragging about and the successes I’m not seeing that for ERO I’m not seeing about like hey we nab like x amount of offenders for armed robbery or carjacking or stuff like that so even with that they're obscuring certain details of their enforcement or they're they may not be doing them to begin with
Preston:
yeah no I get the sense that they're not doing them to begin with I although I also have a hard time believing that anyone who's a political appointee under Joe Biden at ICE is going to be celebrating the removal of them that just doesn't seem like something that really gets them excited you know and I want to I want to circle back to the convicted criminal data that you that you talked about I want to emphasize for our listeners that these decreases it doesn't mean that they're not happening it just means that less and less people are being arrested which is a is a huge cause for concern and like you said there is no mention of the 16,000 illegal aliens that were released by ICE and that's to say nothing because it's a different agency but that's to say nothing of as well the you know the thousands of people that are being released by customs and border protection at the border so this is becoming a big issue and all of those people who are being released at the border are then going to be people that ICE will have to deal with in the future for the most part either by over either by you know not showing up to their court hearing most of them will eventually be found to not have credible claims of asylum and so they'll be illegally present in the united states and that's ICE’s purview and so it's just pouring gasoline on a fire from every angle of what we're seeing when it comes to immigration enforcement by the Biden administration and really this again goes back to specific policy decisions that were put in place by the Biden administration I think the top one that we have to talk about is the enforcement guidance memo that ICE released under DHS secretary Alexandro Mayorkas for those for those listening this is essentially an executive action it has the same force as an executive order that was signed by president Biden but it originated from DHS and what it did is it really restricts where ICE is able to arrest people where they're able to conduct investigations which is why I think like you brought up I don't think they're doing them because where would you be able to have a large-scale investigation like this through enforcement and removals that didn't come into contact with this memorandum and so pretty much anywhere any place of business any house of worship any hospital any it's the list goes on and on and I want to give a hat tip to the center for immigration studies which did an example of this in Washington DC and there's almost nowhere in the nation's capital where an illegal alien could be even questioned or detained by ICE and it's and think about that those policies are nationwide and so there are very few places where ICE is actually able to go in and detain and remove illegal aliens and within that guidance as well they framed it as well we're using ICE’s limited resources to go after the worst of the worst when it comes to criminals fine that's great but you also have to recognize that there are scores of other people that are here that are committing not necessarily petty crimes but crimes that are not necessarily child sex trafficking or murder or any I mean we're looking you know there's and some of those some of the crimes that we would think of as being particularly egregious you know bodily assault robbery these kinds of things are not classified as some of these higher tier crimes that ICE is supposed to instantly remove people for and so for those listening at home this is why this it's such a big issue is because there are people who under this memorandum are staying in the united states even though they've committed crimes there are there are wide parts of this country where ICE is not even allowed to go in and conduct investigations and it's shocking and I don't get the sense that anyone in Biden’s orbit or particularly in the department of homeland security is seeing this as a problem
Jason:
no I don't think they are I mean to go back to what you're saying about these memorandums that essentially handcuff ICE from doing their jobs I was look I was it reminded me during the Obama administration where they had a memo I believe it was called the Morton memo and that essentially placed guidelines for ICE conducting their operations and arrests and basically what it said was hey we have limited resources we're going to focus you know the common phrase was deport felons not families and even you know and you know we here at fear disagreed with that policy decision but at the end of the day it was nowhere near what it is today I mean we have safe spaces for illegal aliens where they cannot be where ICE cannot cut as you said come within a certain distance of them and be taken into custody you know even in the Morton memo we didn't have these guidelines saying like okay well if he's if the suspect is of a particular age they have family they have ties to community no I mean now we it's all I can only imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that you have to go through check all the boxes to make sure okay we can take this we can use all of our time and resources or 24 hours to get this one individual into custody so long as we're following it by the book no this is truly troubling and what's also interesting as well is that when you look as you mentioned at the first four months of fy 2021 those were under the trump administration so again while he was still in office ICE was still doing their job in conducting and effectuating deportations that said I can only imagine what fy 2022 will bring when Biden’s policies will be full throttle without stop I honestly I hope that the Biden administration reverses course on their on their immigration agenda
Preston:
yeah and that's a good point to bring up and if you look at a visualization of the data of the removal data you do see that in those first few months with trump it's largely a pretty stable number where it had been historically for years and then as soon as Biden gets in office and as soon as these some of these decisions start you know formulating and start getting into place with Mayorkas in DHS you see them just plummet and then also it's interesting because if you look at the customs and border protection apprehensions data we see a very similar pattern where you see you know the line is where is you know relatively the same for those months under trump and then as soon as Biden comes in it skyrockets and it's just going up and up and that's obviously a different agency but under the same department but they show the same thing and it's that Biden becoming president had a direct negative effect on ICE arrests and ICE removals and it had a very positive effect on apprehensions at the border which positive is not a good thing that means more people are coming to the border and and why wouldn't they you know they Joe Biden spent his entire campaign talking about how he was going to amnesty every illegal alien in the country that is still something that although there aren't the votes for it on capitol hill they're the everyone in the bite administration would love to get that done today if they could they just can't because of the political reality of a of a very tight margins in congress but you know there is there it is nothing else it is very clearly the Biden effect Joe Biden is responsible for the numbers that we're seeing both in the ICE removals report and in the apprehension data that we're seeing from CBP
Jason:
no one thing I wanted to bring up is that we've been and I know you recently wrote about this in your recent blog here that the Biden administration plans on ending Title 42 which essentially allows border patrol to expeditely deport illegal aliens over concerns of covid 19 things of that nature if they get rid of that the borders wide open we're only going to get more illegal aliens being released into the country which later down the road is going to make ICE’s job harder and when there's an administration that allows them to go out there and arrest illegal aliens and have them removed
Preston:
yeah no the Title 42 news is pretty big and that could be happening down the road we've heard that it might end as soon as April Title 42 is not a permanent solution to what's happening at the border crisis it is tied in to the covid pandemic which has been waning in recent months but it's alarming because that is the last policy in place that has any meaningful effect on the number of illegal aliens that are actually then entering the united states for those at home listening under Title 42 about half of all people that are apprehended at the border are turned away and sent back into Mexico citing Title 42 so only half of these you know hundreds of thousands of people every month that are coming in are actually making it to the U.S. and are beginning the asylum process if we didn't have Title 42 in place and it's not going to be there forever and it is going to end once Title 42 is out of the picture all of those people are coming to the U.S. they're staying in the U.S. they're applying for asylum in the U.S. and they're staying for two to three years as their case winds through immigration court this is going to be a disaster when Title 42 is removed this is going to be a catastrophe at the border and I do not know if the Biden administration is willing to make any kind of change but I'm not a prognosticator but I would think that once they see the political reaction to this you know immigration he's already very underwater in immigration polling already this I think would break the Biden administration when it comes to immigrant there is no way that you can cover up 160,000 people coming in every single month and all of them applying for asylum none of them returning to Mexico none of them returning to their home countries so that's something for our listeners to keep in mind as we as we move into April and into further into the spring is not if but when Title 42 is no longer in place
Jason:
well that's a great point to end on today for those of you listening we hope you enjoyed this podcast we encourage everyone to share this podcast with your friends your family and we hope you leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get podcasts to learn more about FAIR please visit our website fairus.org we're also available on Facebook and twitter @FAIRImmigration this has been Understanding Immigration brought to you by FAIR