ICE Doubles Down on Taxpayer-Funded Social Services for Illegal Aliens
August 30, 2023
President Biden began his presidency by announcing a moratorium on removals and amending the immigration enforcement priorities so that fewer people were apprehended and detained. Over the years, his open-border policies have resulted in more than 7 million illegal encounters at our borders, and the non-detained docket grew out of control from 3.26 million in 2020 to 5.7 million today. As advocates continue to demand an end to immigration enforcement, the Biden Administration is adopting even more extreme policies, attempting to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by turning the agency into a welfare and social services provider.
As ICE noted in a 2020 draft internal report intended for Congress, the best way to enforce our immigration laws is through detention. In that report, the agency explained, “The only effective means of ensuring compliance with a court order, to include an individual’s departure from the United States at the end of their immigration proceedings (if ordered removed by an immigration judge), is through the use of detention.”
FAIR agrees that detention is most effective in ensuring compliance with our immigration laws and that illegal aliens depart the country when ordered. However, the ATD program, when managed properly, provides an avenue for the government to monitor those it cannot detain when Congress fails to adequately fund detention beds. As the Biden Administration has pushed to cut detention beds – while simultaneously not using available beds and then claiming that it cannot detain illegal aliens due to a lack of detention beds – programs like ATD help to hold the government accountable and keep track of the growing illegal alien population.
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2023/08/30/ice-doubles-down-taxpayer-funded-social-services-illegal-aliens
