Biden is earning an F in all areas of immigration policy
OPINION:
The eyes of every U.S. citizen who cares about American sovereignty are turned toward the crisis along the Rio Grande. The images coming from the southwestern border zone are disturbing and disconcerting. In reality, however, the chaos down south is only part of the story.
As soon as it began, the Biden administration set about doing everything in its power to dismantle our border controls. That’s bad enough. But the White House has also abandoned its responsibility to remove immigration violators who were already here.
According to reliable estimates, before the current border surge, roughly 5.5 million aliens entered the United States illegally in the first two years of the Biden administration. Those people were added to the community of unlawfully present aliens, which has been projected to consist of between 15.5 million and 22 million people. And at his behest, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is doing absolutely nothing to find and deport these immigration lawbreakers.
Per annual reports issued by DHS, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 267,258 aliens in fiscal 2019, the last fiscal year that ran entirely under the Trump administration. That places fiscal 2019 on par with other years when enforcement-minded administrations used the full capacities of both DHS and the Immigration Courts.
In fiscal 2020, part of which fell under Mr. Biden, the number of aliens deported by ICE dropped measurably to 185,884. In fiscal 2021, the number of ICE removals dropped precipitously to 59,011. Fiscal 2021 was the first fiscal year that occurred entirely under the Biden administration. In fiscal 2022, the number of ICE removals rose slightly, with a total of 72,177 aliens deported from the United States.
Fiscal 2023 doesn’t end until Sept. 30, so updated removal data isn’t yet available. At present, however, the DHS website claims that the department has increased “removals and returns” compared with fiscal 2022. But don’t believe the hype. If the published numbers for fiscal 2023 wind up appearing to be higher than those for fiscal 2022, it will most likely be because Mr. Biden and his faithful minion, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, combined “returns” and “removals” — two separate and distinct categories of expulsions — to create the false impression that they’re actually doing something about immigration violators.
According to the DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics for 2019, “removals” are “the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States based on an order of removal.” “Returns,” on the other hand, are “the confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal.”
In the past, DHS and its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, drew a bright line between removals and returns. That’s because removals represent the end of a complex process that typically involves locating and arresting an alien; presenting the alien for a civil trial before the U.S. Immigration Court; and the formal execution of an order of removal issued by an immigration judge. The annual number of removals has typically risen and fallen according to the level of commitment a particular administration has shown to enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Returns, on the other hand, generally involve the rapid expulsion of aliens arrested on, or within a few miles of, the border, along with people who withdraw their applications for admission to the U.S. at a port of entry. In fact, in the jargon used by DHS officers, returns are referred to as “turnarounds,” since most returnees are intercepted and immediately returned to their country of citizenship.
Conflating returns and removals is a technique first employed by the Obama administration in order to portray former President Barack Obama as the “deporter-in-chief.” Another deceptive tactic pioneered by the faux-deporter-in-dhief and now being used by Mr. Biden is bumping up DHS arrest statistics by counting apprehensions twice — once when Customs and Border Protection encounters an alien and again when CBP transfers that alien to ICE for long-term detention. Those tactics didn’t work then, and you shouldn’t fall for them now. America needs both secure borders and a robust immigration enforcement system. But our current president is doing his best to avoid enforcing any of our immigration laws.
The fact is, with about 5,000 miles of coastline, about 8,000 miles of land borders and 118 international airports, it is inevitable that some people are going to make it over one of our international boundaries and remain in the U.S. illegally. Ultimately, secure borders mean nothing if everyone who manages to cross them gets to stay here. So, while the southern border tends to attract the most media attention, interior immigration enforcement may, in the end, prove to be even more important than border management.
So don’t believe the hype. Messrs. Biden and Mayorkas haven’t gotten a D in border security while achieving a passing grade in interior enforcement. The reality is that they’re earning an F in all areas of immigration policy.
• Tom Homan is a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Matt O’Brien is the director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, and previously served as an immigration judge.
