For more than a decade, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released a public report in the final weeks of December detailing the number of illegal aliens that were detained and deported during the previous fiscal year, along with other immigration data. That practice apparently came to an end with the arrival of the Biden administration because the annual report was not published in December and there has still been no sign of it. Former ICE chief of staff Jon Feere described the failure to release the annual report as “absolutely shocking.” The report isn’t optional, by the way. There is a congressional statute requiring the release of the annual report. Feere said that he’d assumed they might release it on New Year’s Even when few people are paying attention to the news, but that didn’t happen either. This is just the latest example we’ve seen of the reality behind what Biden promised on the campaign trail would be “the most transparent administration ever.” (Free Beacon)
The Biden administration has yet to release a report that details the number of illegal immigrants removed from the United States in 2021, keeping the public in the dark about its handling of the immigration crisis.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not release its annual report in 2021, a departure from standard agency practice since at least 2011. In each of the last nine years, ICE released the report in the final weeks of the calendar year, most recently on during the Trump administration…
The absence of the 2021 annual report has prompted outrage on Capitol Hill. Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) questioned the motives behind the White House’s secrecy on the topic of immigration.
The Biden admin is the first in at least a decade to not issue the ICE "End of Year" report on arrests, removals, and crime stats. This dramatic reversal of transparency prevents the public from evaluating their policies. Perhaps CNN can demand some accountability here? https://t.co/XWfRmyr09g
— Jon Feere (@JonFeere) January 4, 2022
Not only was the report not released on schedule, but it’s also not clear if the report has even been compiled. When the Free Beacon asked an ICE spokeswoman about the status, she would not confirm whether or not it was complete and said that she didn’t have a firm date for when the public could expect it.
It’s impossible not to detect the stench of politics in this failure to launch. Biden was obviously convinced by his most radically progressive advisors that his open border policies, which led us into the ongoing Biden border crisis, would be highly popular if people just had the chance to see them in action. But as the linked report indicates, Real Clear Politics finds Biden’s approval rating on immigration to be at 35%, even lower than his overall approval rating. If we could get anyone besides Fox News and traditionally conservative outlets to report on the border situation, that number would probably be even lower. It’s the same thing we’ve seen with many other liberal policies currently being shoved down the nation’s throat.
So that’s one potential explanation for the administration’s failure to carry out this requirement. They just don’t want to hand another potentially damaging headline to the media as we ramp up for the midterm elections. But if that’s not the reason, the only other option would be incompetence. I’m frankly not sure which one is worse.
It’s also worth noting that this wasn’t the only congressionally mandated report that the Biden administration failed to prepare and release on the subject of immigration. At the end of the previous fiscal year, the White House was also supposed to deliver a report on the estimated number of illegal aliens currently in the country. But as the Free Beacon reported in November, that report never appeared either. At this point, Team Biden is simply ignoring the law if it looks like it might further erode his support.
Even if the report never arrives, we’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what it would say. We’ve seen record numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border over the past year, with many being given free rides further into America’s interior, courtesy of the Biden administration. If there was any good news at all in that report, Jen Psaki would already be waving it around in front of the White House press corps like a flag. But it’s certainly full of nothing but more bad news.
