Former acting ICE director: ICE can deport illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Why aren’t we?

f the DHS will not close the border to lawfare, why won’t it at least deport those Central American families who have gone through the cumbersome legal process and have been ordered to be deported?

Appearing on Fox & Friends last Friday, former acting ICE Director Tom Homan said he believes the most effective deterrent now to the flow of migrants at the border is to begin deporting all those with final deportation orders.

“We could do more,” said Homan, who headed deportation operations during the 2014 wave of Central American immigrants. “I’ve said many times, there are over 100,000 family units with final orders, been ordered removed by an immigration judge. We need to seek them out and return them to their homeland. We need to execute the final orders issued by the judges, or there’s no integrity to the entire system. That’s not being done; we need to do it. I did it four years ago and it worked. I can’t understand why that’s not happening.”

Indeed, I reported in March that over one million illegal aliens remain in this country despite final deportation orders. According to data obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) via a FOIA request, as of June 2018, there were 450,976 individuals from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with final deportation orders and another 715,930 with pending final orders. Those with pending final orders are usually individuals who have already been ordered deported by immigration judges but are appealing their cases to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the appellate body of the DOJ’s administrative immigration courts.

These numbers are a year old and were collected before much of the unprecedented surge from Central America. It’s likely that by now the numbers of those with final deportation orders are even higher. Homan noted that specifically targeting Central American families with final deportation orders will serve as a strong deterrent to those in the pipeline now trying to make the trip or thinking of coming here illegally.

When the hosts of Fox & Friends tried to press Homan on the efficacy of the Trump threat to levy tariffs on Mexico, Homan steered the discussion back to deportations. “I’ll say it once again, the secretary of Homeland Security needs to approve this operation. ICE has been ready to do this operation for months – to go seek out those that have final orders. If we don’t do that, there’s no integrity in the system. It works.”

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.