Unless something drastically changes over the next two months, more than 2 million migrants will have been arrested while illegally attempting to cross the southern border during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
Under Biden’s open-borders policies, hundreds of thousands of these migrants were then released into the United States, often flown at taxpayer expense, to their final destination. There, they will apply for asylum, a process that will take years, and the vast majority of them (more than 85%) will lose their asylum claims.
But that doesn’t mean they will be deported.
Even before Biden became president, only a tiny percentage of the over 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. were being deported each year. And now, under Biden, that number has dropped to almost zero.
The Center for Immigration Studies recently obtained data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing that interior deportations fell by 90% during Biden’s first five months in office. If ICE maintains this pace of interior deportations through the end of the year, they will have deported just 62,000 illegal immigrants in all of 2021. In contrast, President Donald Trump’s ICE deported over 267,000 illegal immigrants in 2019.
The drop in interior border enforcement has been the greatest in some of the country’s largest inland cities. The New Orleans field office deported 10,027 illegal immigrants in the first five months of 2019 but just 913 in 2021. Atlanta went from 10,360 deportations to 982. And Houston went from 13,182 to 1,899.
Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson has said ICE is decreasing deportations overall so that the agency can focus “our limited resources on cases that present threats to national security, border security, and public safety.” But this is not true — the deportation data obtained by CIS show that the overall number of serious criminal deportations is down, even if the smaller number is now a higher percentage share of all deportations. In other words, Biden is actually allowing more serious criminals to stay.
In the first five months of 2019, for example, Trump’s ICE deported 1,682 illegal immigrants who were also convicted of sexual assault. During a similar time frame in 2021, Biden deported only 798 such offenders. A similar pattern exists for drug traffickers (6,871 to 2,460), homicide (705 to 357), and robbery (1,119 to 408). Biden’s failure to deport these convicted criminals means that there are more violent illegal immigrants on the street capable of harming innocent people.
It should be noted that this information is from only the first five months of Biden’s term as president. There have been some recent pro-enforcement victories over the open-borders crowd. Biden has resumed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, for example. He has also tripled deportation flights from the southern border to migrants’ home countries. Biden has also stepped up the use of private prisons to detain illegal immigrants held by ICE.
These are all recent and welcome changes to the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Hopefully, the deportation numbers have gone up since July, too. Unfortunately, however, the same open-borders advocates who helped create Biden’s border crisis in the first place continue to be in his administration. And until Biden is out of the White House, there is always a danger that they will take over on policy once again.
