Biden Administration is Abolishing Immigration Enforcement
While the chaos at the southern border has been big news for months, not as many Americans are aware of a slower moving but equally consequential Biden immigration policy — the dismantling of immigration enforcement within the country. Even as record high numbers of illegal border crossers were caught and released into the country in 2021, record low numbers of aliens were sent home.
According to records my organization obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under Biden, deportations have dropped by 80 percent even from 2020’s low point during the pandemic lockdowns, and by 90 percent since 2019, the last normal year for immigration enforcement. We can expect that this year ICE’s performance will sink to the lowest number of removals since ICE was created in 2003, and about one-fourth the number removed in 2019.
The collapse in enforcement is not accidental, nor due to lingering pandemic precautions; it is by design. On his very first day in office, Biden issued an executive order essentially prohibiting ICE officers from taking action against illegal aliens unless they are a known or suspected terrorist, convicted of a very serious felony, or a very recent illegal arrival — and, sometimes, not even then.
The order has since been modified to allow ICE officers to request permission to arrest and remove others — but not until they complete extensive paperwork to document and describe every instance in which the alien had contact with immigration and other law enforcement agencies, and not until they do a formal assessment of other factors, such as family members residing here, illness, or other ties the person might have in the community.
Biden officials say that the strict limits are necessary to make sure that ICE focuses on those illegal aliens who are a serious threat to the nation and to their community. Said Tae Johnson, Biden’s acting ICE director, “We must prioritize our efforts to achieve the greatest security and safety impact.”
But ICE has always focused its efforts primarily on public safety threats. The point of these new restrictions on enforcement is to severely curtail enforcement, not make it more efficient or effective.
ICE now has the largest budget it has ever had, and yet is doing less enforcement — including less enforcement against deportable criminals. Ten years ago, ICE had a budget of $5.3 billion and just over 20,000 employees, and managed to remove 224,000 aliens from the interior, of whom about 150,000, or two-thirds, were convicted criminals.
This year, ICE has a budget of $7.9 billion and 21,000 employees, but because of the strict rules and red tape, will remove fewer than 70,000 deportable aliens from the interior. The proportion of convicted criminals will be the same, but the total number will be much smaller number — probably about 50,000, judging from the records I reviewed.
According to one officer, “Instead of having one person working in a jail who can arrest four or five criminal aliens in a shift, now we have to send five or six guys out to make one or maybe two arrests in a shift.”
Some of the ICE field offices did almost no enforcement in Biden’s first five months. From January 21 to July 9, the Baltimore office removed only 32 aliens from Maryland (compared with 248 last year), and the Boston office sent home only 156 from New England (compared with 790 last year).
The suppression of enforcement within the country serves as one more incentive for those abroad to take their chances to cross illegally, knowing that they face little threat of being sent home. It means that American communities will continue to be saddled with the costs of illegal immigration, including displacement of U.S. workers, wage depression, more spending on social services and, especially, schools. With fewer criminal aliens being removed, there will be unnecessary victimizations.
State and local governments must not sit back and wait for Congress to take action. Governors, legislators, county councils and sheriffs should not only tally the costs, but also act to discourage illegal settlement by disrupting the pipelines of private and NGO actors who help illegal border crossers, penalizing illegal employment, restricting eligibility for public benefits, and requiring police to cooperate fully with ICE. We know from experience that creating an environment of low tolerance for illegal settlement locally can act as a virtual wall to help shield communities from the problems created by poor federal policies.
Jessica Vaughan is the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC think tank.
