Amid the border wall funding debate, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained on Twitter last week that “nearly half of all undocumented immigrants come to the United States but overstay their visas. A border wall would do nothing to curb visa overstays.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have the resources to apprehend a fraction of the estimated 600,000 visa overstays from 2017 alone. Now couple that with more than 4 million overstays in the U.S. already, and it will not happen.
Fact check: Nearly half of all undocumented immigrants come to the United States legally but then overstay their visas. A border wall would do nothing to curb visa overstays.
— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) January 11, 2019
What is an overstay? According to the Department of Homeland Security, an overstay is “a nonimmigrant who was lawfully admitted to the United States for an authorized period but remained in the United States beyond his or her authorized period of admission.” They have no entitlement to stay beyond their visa period of admission.
There are numerous levels of bureaucracy in the visa process: from the State Department issuing visas to Customs and Border Protection monitoring entrants to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approving immigrant visas and, finally, ICE removing overstays. Multiple layers of government bureaucracy, all needing resources to monitor who comes and goes, or doesn’t go.
In fiscal year 2017, ICE conducted 226,119 removals. That includes all removals, from criminal aliens to those ordered removed by an immigration judge. In my opinion, ICE would need to be doubled or tripled to apprehend and remove overstays effectively, and that is if ICE focused its entire removal mission on overstays.
I was an ICE fugitive operations supervisor in charge of all immigration enforcement for the state of Delaware. My teams focused mainly on criminal aliens, from gang members to aggravated felons, with only a finite amount of resources available to go after any visa overstays with removal orders.
ICE is hindered not only by insufficient staff to apprehend overstays, but also by technology. The DHS Inspector General said, “ICE personnel responsible for investigating in-country visa overstays pieced together information from dozens of systems and databases, some of which were not integrated and did not electronically share information.”
With antiquated technology and inadequate staff, the overstay problem is here to stay.
Feinstein brings up an excellent point in her tweet: The country is being overrun not only from all borders and ports of entry, but also by those exploiting our immigration laws by overstaying their visas. Perhaps she will finally take a step across the aisle to fix our broken immigration system.
Jason Piccolo (@DRJasonPiccolo) is a former Border Patrol agent, ICE special agent, and DHS supervisor. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and author of Unwavering: A Border Agent’s Journey from Hunter to Hunted.
