Lauren Moye, FISM News
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The Biden administration recently touted that arrests and deportations of convicted criminals illegally entering the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has nearly doubled, in an apparent effort to show that its policies are proving successful. This comes as part of a broader attempted image overhaul by the White House in regard to the border, as Democrats have begun to realize that their lax immigration policies have proven unpopular with the American public.
The White House released a document earlier this month, painting the narrative that Biden’s immigration policies have been successful. In response, several officials have publicly questioned why another more critical ICE report remains missing. ICE whistleblowers who spoke to both the Federalist and the Washington Times, believe that the DHS is intentionally hiding key data from the public eye.
The controversy stems from the missing ICE “Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” for the 2021 fiscal year. In response to a recent Congress request, the Biden administration released select ICE enforcement statistics in a more generalized overview called “ICE Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report,” instead of the traditional detailed report.
Despite being published annually at the end of every calendar year for a decade, the much looked-for comprehensive report has now been delayed without explanation for nearly three months. This delay prevents a detailed analysis of how President Joe Biden’s “Revision of Civil Immigration Enforcement Policies and Priorities” executive order from January 2021 has impacted national security. It also prevents immigration officials from making informed policy upgrades to make border security more effective.
According to Biden’s immigration policy, ICE is to focus limited enforcement and removal resources “on cases presumed to be national security, public safety, and border security priorities.” These policies were issued as an interim memorandum on February 18, 2021, by Acting Ice Director Tae Johnson. Later, guidelines were formerly introduced that advocated for a “case-by-case assessment” to determine if enforcement action was necessary.
The report that the White House released touts the success of these implemented policies, pointing that 12,025 illegal immigrants were arrested with aggravated felony convictions. This was “nearly double the 6,815” arrests from FY2020 and makes for a 51% increase in the monthly average from the “calendar years 2017-2020,” the White House administration shared, without including a detailed chart to illustrate the year-over-year changes of this statistic.
“What the public has not been told is that the numbers appear higher in FY2021 due to the Biden administration repeatedly demanding that officers make it a priority to determine whether an alien should be labeled an aggravated felon and then record that determination into the system,” The Federalist reported based on interviews with multiple ICE officials.
Previously, this metric was not tracked accurately because it wasn’t deemed as crucial as other statistics. Additionally, the term itself is misleading since it is often dependent on differing state laws to define what counts as an aggravated crime.
The Federalist notes that the numbers given by the White House also show a drop in “offenses associated with” arrested illegal immigrants. In FY2021, there were 1,506 homicide-related offenses compared to 1,837 in FY 2020. There were 3,415 sexual assaults most recently, down nearly a thousand from the 4,385 reported in FY2020. Assaults were nearly halved between the years with 19,549 compared to 37,247. This leads to additional confusion as to why the aggravated crime statistic rose proportionately to encounters, while other crime-related stats are noticeably down.
A similar report by the Washington Times also alleges that important metrics concerning illegal immigration have been covered up. This means that a complete breakdown of crimes connected to detainees has been left undisclosed as well as the total number of detainees.
Their sources said that the unpublished data shows that the ICE deportation division had 48% fewer criminals convictions, deported 63% fewer criminals, and issued 46% fewer “detainer” requests to other agencies.
“The fact that the Biden administration is not publishing these numbers on their own is a very strong sign that the White House knows the impact of their policies is disastrous for ICE’s mission and for public safety,” said Jon Feere, former chief of staff at ICE under Trump. “They have chosen to allow countless criminal aliens to go free, and they somehow think they can hide this from the public.”