As a Senator, Kamala Harris Tried to Take $220 Million Out of ICE’s Enforcement Division
Already-budgeted funds would mostly have been transferred to anti-border activist groups
By Jon Feere on July 29, 2024
Harris ICE
In the middle of the Trump administration’s effort to ramp up deportations of criminal illegal aliens in 2019, then-Senator Kamala Harris introduced a bill that would have taken $220 million out of the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is responsible for arrests and deportations of illegal aliens. The goal of the bill (S.388 in the 116th Congress) was to frustrate ICE’s public safety mission and allow for criminal aliens to remain in the United States.
The funds had already been budgeted to ICE, but Harris’s bill would have transferred the main chunk of the funds ($180 million) out of the agency and into the hands of bureaucrats running the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “to provide the post-release legal, case management, and child advocate services” to unaccompanied illegal-alien children and their sponsors.
Funds to NGOs. Harris’s plan was to take ICE’s enforcement funds and have ORR grant them to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), specifically so that services for illegal aliens could be “provided by a social worker, employed by a nonprofit entity” for the purposes of “making referrals to area legal services”, “locating medical and therapeutic services”, providing “post-release case management…for the duration of their immigration proceedings”, and facilitating “efforts to connect every unaccompanied child…with legal representation for his or her immigration proceedings”. In other words, Harris’s plan was to take money Congress gave to ICE for enforcement purposes and funnel it to immigration attorneys and immigrant right groups, which undoubtedly would have benefited many virulent anti-border, anti-ICE activists.
https://cis.org/Feere/Senator-Kamala-Harris-Tried-Take-220-Million-Out-ICEs-Enforcement-Division
