Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana struggled on Thursday to explain why her agency effectively cut its own funding last year, rather than use the money for border enforcement efforts.
ICE returned $113 million of deportation funding last year and requested $138 million less for the next fiscal year. President Obama justified his executive orders on immigration by saying that the policy would allow the Department of Homeland Security to target its resources towards the most dangerous criminals, but House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., suggested that ICE’s move to return funds undercuts that claim.
“This administration’s failure to allocate resources to critical program areas that directly impact ICE’s ability to keep criminal aliens off the street belies any assertion that public safety is a primary concern,” Goodlatte said.
Saldana suggested that the move was made because the financial needs of her agency change year by year. “It is very difficult for us to anticipate the number of people coming across the border from one year to the next,” she said. “It goes up and it goes down over the course of a year.”
Goodlatte countered that she should be using the money to target dangerous people who are already in the country, not just the ones crossing the border. “There are over 250,000 individuals in this country who are not lawfully present in this country and have committed crimes in this country,” he said.
Saldana defended Obama’s enforcement policies, but failed to explain why deportation money was returned while criminal immigrants remain in the country.
“This enforcement priority approach that you and I disagree on, as to its wisdom, focuses not on the release of criminal aliens but on the apprehension and removal of criminal aliens,” she said. “Our statistics alone with respect to the beds, those are filled by people with one or more convictions that we are preparing to remove from the country. I think the last number I saw was something like 84 percent fit into our top priority.”
That didn’t satisfy Goodlatte. “I would recommend that when you have limited resources and you have a huge problem that is not addressed, you not return money back that could be used to keep Americans safer than they are now,” he replied.
