ICE: Naw, we don't have any records on those 377,000 illegals we released

Townhall Media/Julio Rosas

As we’ve watched the Biden border crisis grow exponentially worse over the two years since the President took office, the news has been uniformly dismal. And if Title 42 is eventually lifted, the situation will deteriorate further and faster. But Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly assured us that all of the migrant encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been tracked by ICE and those people will eventually be processed through our immigration courts and/or the asylum process. Yet the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University has been collecting all of the available data and discovered that claims being made by Homeland Security are simply not true. In a recent letter to TRAC, ICE admitted that it has “no records” for nearly 378,000 migrants who were released into the country’s interior with electronic tracking devices over the past three years. (Daily Caller)

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted it has “no records” of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants released into the country with electronic tracking devices, the agency said in a Dec. 22 letter to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

ICE informed TRAC that it had “no records” of the 377,980 individuals monitored by the agency’s “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program used to electronically track illegal immigrants released into the country. TRAC had asked for data via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on those in ATD custody from the start of fiscal year 2019 to August 2022.

“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean.”

The flood of humanity washing over the southern border is now apparently so bad that our immigration laws are being enforced on the honor system. We’ll give you a blanket (if we have any left) and put you on a bus to some other part of the country. When you get there, we’re just going to trust that you’ll find the local ICE office and present yourself for processing and possible deportation. What could possibly go wrong?

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The alternative for most of them will be to simply blend into the rest of the growing population of illegal aliens. Then they can wait for the Democrats to pass some form of general amnesty for illegals and they will have fully succeeded in thwarting our immigration laws. So was this Biden’s plan all along? He probably won’t say the words aloud, but it’s easy to see how some might suspect that was the case.

We must have kept records for some of them, though, right? Yes, we did. But even for the ones for whom they do have records, more than 150,000 were released without having a court date scheduled.

In a stunning new report, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released more than 150,000 illegal migrants and border crossers into the U.S. without a Notice to Appear (NTA) in immigration court during the summer of 2021.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody was able to obtain footage showing the agency releasing tens of thousands of illegals into the country as part of a lawsuit against Biden’s Catch and Release program.

You already know that a significant number of those who were released are not going to voluntarily ask for a court date. That is particularly true of those with criminal histories who could potentially face deportation. We have reached the point where more than five million illegal aliens have entered the United States since Joe Biden took office and a significant majority of them will never see a day in court and will never be sent back to their country of origin.

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To be clear, this is not intended as a knock against ICE. They’re obviously doing the best they can with the limited resources made available to them. The fault here lies entirely with the White House. The Biden administration has completely failed to expand both funding and staffing for border security. That might have at least given them a chance to deal with the immeasurable flood of migrants swarming over the border that Joe Biden has left open for all intents and purposes.

Five million people. Just pause for a moment and think about that. It’s a number greater than the population of 26 of the country’s 50 states. We’re witnessing one of the greatest crimes ever committed against this country and both Joe Biden and his “border czar” Kamala Harris need to be held accountable for it.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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