Biden's border enforcement is collapsing as dangerous criminal aliens enter and stay in the U.S. while ICE agents wait for approval from bureaucrats to detain or deport. Alarmed by this administration's dangerous border policies, America First Legal (AFL) again sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
According to a May 10 press release, AFL sued the administration for illegally withholding records on dangerous criminals who have been allowed to enter and stay in the U.S. FOIAs reveal ICE's weekly enforcement reports show the Biden administration is requiring ICE to provide "narrative justification" for the removal of asylum seekers and other illegal aliens prior to acting on their detention or removal. According to the AFL press release:
"At the beginning of the Biden Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) directed ICE to "reprioritize" its approach to enforcement actions. Open border zealots, newly in charge of immigration enforcement, required all ICE officers to seek pre-approval from headquarters in Washington, D.C., before they were allowed to arrest or remove an illegal alien—even those convicted of heinous crimes."
In May 2023, about "half of the existing data" was turned over to AFL with alarming results. According to the documents obtained, "ICE has produced data on 24,000 illegal aliens against whom an enforcement action was approved." ICE officers may arrest illegal aliens with pending criminal charges; however, they are required to enter personal information into the system and then wait for someone up the chain of command to approve their disposition. Many of them should have been deported immediately.
According to a CIS May 2021 article:
"ICE officers are now basically barred from questioning, apprehending, detaining, and deporting any but the most dangerous criminal aliens in the United States. Those policies are set forth in a February 18 memo from then-Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson.
Most significantly, that Tae Johnson memo "prioritizes" (read: "restricts") ICE apprehensions of aliens who have criminal arrests or warrants unless they have also been convicted of an aggravated felony or satisfy needlessly stringent "criminal street gang" criteria."
As reported by AFL, data captured in the weekly ICE reports show alarming numbers of criminals whose disposition has not been adjudicated. Their crimes are also alarming and include prior records of sex trafficking, rape, murder, fraud, robbery, and cartel involvement, to name a few. Pictured below is a mere fraction of the thousands of aliens who committed criminal acts listed in the documents provided by AFL.
Downloaded AFL records: The documents prove "illegal immigration is not a victimless crime." In many cases, years pass between the time of the ICE officer report and the alien's removal. Many have committed multiple crimes and have a record of "multiple prior removals" and were still allowed into the U.S. Others crossed illegally without any detection at all and were later apprehended after having committed a crime.
In addition, according to the data, the "word "Restitution" occurs 66 times," meaning some of these "asylum seekers" owe the U.S. big money. The AFL press release states the offenders "owe a collective total of $100 million for offenses that include tax fraud, health care fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud, and other criminal acts. Eighteen aliens have court-ordered restitution exceeding $1 million each, including two who owe over $10 million each. One alien, convicted of defrauding the United States Government of over $56 million, single-handedly owes $28 million in restitution for health care fraud."
Gene Hamilton, AFL's Vice President and General Counsel, stated:
"Seeing law enforcement officers have to justify why convicted felons need to be deported should shock all Americans. He praised Texas and Louisiana for taking action to stop the policy and hopes for a good decision from the Supreme Court soon."
Immigration Enforcement Under Biden Has Collapsed
The Biden administration has abused the humanitarian parole policy. Humanitarian parole is reserved for decisions that are dispensed on a case-by-case basis and are not a way to legalize illegal immigration en masse.
The Biden administration's immigration policies have caused a total collapse of immigration enforcement in the U.S. As of the end of April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported about 6 million illegals have crossed the southern border. And that does not include the "gotaways." There have been approximately 1,500,000 "gotaways" since Biden took office.
Europe's Catastrophic Management of Asylum Should Give Pause to Open Border Policies in the U.S.
For years France and other European countries have struggled with immigration policies that have largely gone unchecked. The policies are causing chaos and often produce violence. The chaos is due in part to the Dublin Regulation, wherein a person [who is] granted refugee status—or any other legal status for that matter—in a Schengen country (Sweden, in this case) can move freely to any other European country within the Schengen region.
Europe's "catastrophic management of asylum" has caused chaos and violence in France and other countries. European immigration policies have led to an influx of diseases like scabies and diphtheria, mental health issues, an inability to house and care for the refugees, and unrest. The third Pact on Immigration and Asylum, launched in September 2020, was meant to distribute the burden of asylum seekers among European countries. However, member states also agreed not to prosecute humanitarian organizations bringing in massive numbers of migrants who enter by sea. As a result of these and other immigration policies, accommodating refugees has become both burdensome and, at times, dangerous. The consequences of dysfunctional European asylum policies may serve as a warning of what is to come if the U.S. does not rein in its own lax immigration standards of entry for refugees and asylum seekers.
In 2019, Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), wrote a paper entitled "What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security." His objective was to "account for the numbers of suspected terrorists who used irregular overland migration to breach European borders and who were then implicated in terroristic activities between 2014-2018."
Bensman's investigation found that at least 104 "Islamist extremists entered European external borders as migrants seeking asylum, or posing as refugees, and conducted and plotted attacks in nine countries." All of them were either arrested or killed "after participating either in completed and thwarted attacks, or arrested for illegal involvement with designated terrorist groups."
Bensman/2019/https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2019-11/bensman-europe-terror.pdf
Bensman/2019/https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2019-11/bensman-europe-terror.pdf
More recently, the June 8 stabbing at a park in France by a Syrian refugee that left six people severely injured is stirring debate around European immigration policies. The 31-year-old fled the Syrian civil war in 2011 and migrated to Turkey, where he met his wife, also a Syrian national. The couple then moved to Sweden in 2013. At the time, Sweden was known for its "generous asylum acceptance rates," according to a June 11 article from the Center for Immigration Studies. Some argue they should have claimed asylum in Turkey.
