Washington Examiner – by Paul Bedard
Newly revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show that deportations have dropped 90% since 2019, as the coronavirus hit and the Biden administration introduced open-border policies and red tape tying the hands of immigration agents.
What’s more, removals of illegal immigrants convicted of murder, rape, and arson have experienced a dramatic drop from pre-pandemic policies put in place by the Trump administration, which put a high priority on them.
The new data were unveiled today by the Center for Immigration Studies and policy director Jessica M. Vaughan, known for her ties to ICE and Border Patrol officials. She told us that President Joe Biden’s “deliberate refusal to enforce immigration laws is one of the most clueless and egregious acts of negligence in modern government history.”
It is no surprise that deportations are down, though the level is shocking, she said in her report. When Biden came to the Oval Office, he moved swiftly to dismantle former President Donald Trump’s border policies, which had greatly slowed the flow of illegal migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biden stopped construction of the wall, opened border doors, and imposed rules on ICE removal officials that braked deportations.
Her data, provided under the Freedom of Information Act, showed ICE is likely to remove 62,000 illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2021, down from about 186,000 in 2020, which saw reduced activity due to the pandemic. A better comparison, she said, is fiscal year 2019, before the COVID-19 crisis hit, when removals were just over 267,000.
“Biden officials claim that the new policies make ICE more efficient, but in fact, the result is simply less enforcement, and even enforcement against criminals, who should be the top priority. They have accomplished the near abolition of interior immigration enforcement by miring officers in red tape or taking them off the job. Not only is this approach a waste of government resources, it greatly undermines the integrity of our legal immigration system and ends up causing public safety problems to boot,” said Vaughan.
She told Secrets that the president has bowed to liberals and illegal immigrants with his orders to ICE to back off on deportations.
Vaughan said the changes were instituted “to protect noncitizens who don’t qualify to stay. The rationalizations to avoid deporting criminal aliens are mind-boggling — homicide convictions are OK if they took place years ago, sex offense convictions are OK if the perpetrator has a family here, drug trafficking is OK if it was pleaded down to possession, don’t look in any databases to find out if vicious punks are gang members. It’s insulting to legal immigrants, it will be costly for communities, and there will be people who pay a terrible price because of Biden’s policies.”