Biden’s ICE Non-Enforcement Policies Will Make the Border Crisis Worse
‘For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.’
By Andrew R. Arthur on May 27, 2021
A May 25 article in the Washington Post detailed just how severely ICE enforcement has been affected by Biden administration policies. The inane and procrustean limits imposed by the president and his underlings on officers’ ability to detain and deport removable aliens in the interior of the United States described therein will only make the already historically bad border crisis all the worse.
The article is headlined “Biden administration reins in street-level enforcement by ICE as officials try to refocus agency mission”, but the authors (whom I don’t know but greatly respect) know better. ICE enforcement under the Trump administration — despite what you may hear — was a shadow of what it had been under almost all of the Obama administration — and even that wasn’t that great.
In March 2011, then-ICE Director John Morton asserted that ICE only had enough resources to deport 400,000 aliens each year.
Between FY 2017 and FY 2020 — almost all of the Trump administration — ICE removed a total of just 935,346 aliens, 65 percent of whom had criminal arrests or convictions (most of the non-criminals had been arrested at the border). That averages out to fewer than 234,000 aliens a year, or 58 percent of the agency’s capacity.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Bidens-ICE-NonEnforcement-Policies-Will-Make-Border-Crisis-Worse
