DHS’ Plunging Deportation Numbers Fuel Legal Challenge; Deportations Plummet Under Biden Enforcement Policies, and related stories
DHS’ plunging deportation numbers fuel legal challenge:
Republican-led states pleaded Wednesday with a federal judge in Ohio to nix the Biden administration’s limits on immigration arrests and deportations, saying the Homeland Security Department’s new rules amount to an “abdication” of duty under the law.
Deportations have plummeted for murderers, burglars, sexual assault convicts and nearly every other category of criminal, Ohio Deputy Solicitor General May Mailman told the judge.
“This is an abdication framework,” Ms. Mailman said.
Ohio, Arizona and Montana are challenging the rules written last year by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that restrict which immigrants are targeted for arrest or deportation.
Mr. Mayorkas said being in the country illegally is not enough reason to be picked up or removed. Criminal records or cases in which a judge has ordered deportation must be balanced against other factors, such as how old the cases are and whether families in the U.S. depend on the illegal immigrant, he said.
Michael F. Knapp, a Justice Department lawyer, told the court Wednesday that the new rules take “a more humanitarian approach” to enforcement.
U.S. District Judge Michael J. Newman, a Trump appointee, listened during the nearly 90 minutes of arguments and didn’t give any indication which way he was leaning. —>READ MORE HERE
Deportations Plummet Under Biden Enforcement Policies:
Immigration enforcement, as measured by the number of aliens removed from the country, has collapsed to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, according to ICE deportation records the Center has obtained. Under policies imposed by the Biden administration, removals dropped by 80 percent since last year’s low point during the pandemic lockdown, and by 90 percent since 2019, the last normal year for ICE operations. The number of aliens removed who had serious criminal convictions also has declined by over 50 percent from 2020 and by 65 percent since 2019.
The Center recently obtained records from ICE (2019, 2020, 2021) with details on all aliens removed from the beginning of FY 2019 through July 10, 2021.1 The records include information on each alien removed by ICE, including date of removal, criminal convictions, and the ICE field office that handled the removal. Unlike past instances when we obtained these very same records, ICE has so far refused to provide information on whether the removed alien was arrested at the border or in the interior. Therefore, these statistics should be interpreted with caution because it is not clear to what extent they may reflect the level of enforcement at the border as well as in the interior. Nevertheless, it is possible to see in these records just how dramatically the new Biden policies have reduced ICE enforcement activity.
Under Biden Policies, ICE Removals Have Plummeted to a Fraction of Normal Levels. On his first day of office (January 20, 2021), President Biden issued a directive halting virtually all deportations for 100 days and greatly restricting immigration enforcement activity.2 Following a lawsuit by Texas asserting grave fiscal and public safety harm to its citizens from a near-suspension of federal immigration enforcement, within two weeks federal judge Drew Tipton halted the deportation freeze and later enjoined it indefinitely pending further legal action. The restrictions on other enforcement actions have remained in place with some minor modifications, meaning that, in effect, ICE has been limited to removing known or suspected terrorists, aliens convicted of very serious crimes (mostly those defined as “aggravated felons”), and recent illegal arrivals.
As a result of these policies, the number of removals conducted by ICE has dropped dramatically from prior years. The number of removals dropped sharply after Biden’s order, as illustrated in Figure 1, which shows the number of removals each month from October 2018 through June 2021 (the last complete month of data we have). This figure shows that the level of enforcement, as measured by removals, is quite significantly lower than in 2019, and also much lower than the period after February 2020, when ICE had to curtail arrests, detentions, and deportations due to pandemic restrictions. —>READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to related stories:
Report: Biden Deports Only 27K Illegal Aliens, Frees 120K from DHS Custody
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