Sessions accuses Obama administration of 'deliberately' undermining immigration laws
By Howard Koplowitz
on December 02, 2015 at 5:51 PM, updated December 02, 2015 at 5:53 PM
U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., criticized the Obama administration for what he called its "failure" to deport illegal immigrants who commit crimes during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday the he co-chaired.
Sessions, who chairs the committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, said he wasn't satisfied with an Obama administration official's explanation that the removal of criminal illegal immigrants has experienced a steep drop because of effective enforcement and a public awareness campaign warning prospective illegals that they would be turned away at the border.
Sarah Saldaña, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said two-thirds of illegals who are deported are apprehended either on or near the border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection are responsible for those deportations, not ICE, she said.
President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration from November 2014 ordered federal authorities to focus on deporting illegal immigrant criminals instead of illegal immigrant families. Saldaña said the policy resulted in a "record-breaking percentage" of criminal aliens being deported, or 59 percent of all removals last year.
But Sessions didn't find comfort in that statistic, pointing out that ICE removed 150,000 criminal illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2011, which dropped to 135,000 the next year, 110,000 in fiscal year 2013, 86,000 the next year and around 63,000 in fiscal year 2015.
"Excuse me if that doesn't make me feel good, because the numbers [of deportations] are dropping dramatically," he said. "So you're dropping down on other removals and you're defining upward what you consider to be criminal, and you're saying it makes up a larger percentage of a very much smaller pie."
Alabama's junior senator also chastised the administration for saying Congress only gave the immigration enforcement agencies enough money to remove 400,000 illegal aliens in the last fiscal year, yet only 315,000 were removed. He noted that the budget for immigration removal was increased from $2.6 billion in 2011 to $3.4 billion this year, and that the government gave some of the money back because it didn't use the full allotment.
He accused the administration of "undermining – deliberately – the effectiveness of our immigration laws."
"This is encouraging people to come to America unlawfully, to not comply and wait their time, making a mockery of those who patiently wait and try to do it the right way ... and it's just a very bad thing," the senator said.
He said the hearing "demonstrated the failure of our system, when the one area that we were promised was going to be aggressively pursued was criminal aliens, and that is plummeting also. So there's nothing really working effectively."
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