Source: Law Enforcement Today, By Matthew Holloway, February 15, 2024
WASHINGTON, DC – A bombshell report released Wednesday has stated that the Biden administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has readied plans for the mass release of thousands of illegal immigrants, under the guise of needing to cut detainee holding capacity.
Four officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who spoke to The Washington Post, claimed that this is due to a $700 million budget shortfall, which allegedly would have been funded under the $95 billion foreign aid package scuttled by House Republicans for failing to address the border crisis.
According to The Post, the bill would have provided $6 billion in funding that would allow ICE under President Joe Biden’s policies to continue housing illegal immigrants at detention centers throughout the nation. The outlet reported, “The bill’s demise has led ICE officials to begin circulating an internal proposal to save money by releasing thousands of detainees and cutting detention levels from 38,000 beds to 22,000 — the opposite of the enforcement increases Republicans say they want.”
Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-IL) expressed outrage over the seeming implied threat in a post to X, writing, “Biden is now holding our country hostage, threatening to release MS-13 gang members and known rapists & murderers into our communities unless Congress grants “asylum” amnesty to the 10 million illegals he allowed to walk across our border AND gives another $60 billion to [Ukraine].”
“This is absurd, on a number of levels,” House Homeland Security Committee chairman Mark Green (R-TN) said in a statement. “This is just further proof of Secretary Mayorkas’ refusal to comply with the law requiring him to detain illegal aliens—one of the reasons he was just impeached,” he said.
He added that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has “consistently requested fewer ICE beds year after year” and furthermore “consistently failed to even fill the beds that Congress has given him.”
“Instead of treating enforcement as a hostage negotiation—‘give us more money or else’—Secretary Mayorkas should just do his job and follow the law.”
Heeter told The Washington Post that roughly half of the $8.5 billion annual budget of ICE is devoted exclusively to detentions.
As of this writing, neither ICE nor any member of Congress has presented a plan to relieve the budget shortfall through mass deportation of the illegal immigrants currently held in detention which was demonstrated as viable by Pakistan earlier this year.
