President Obama’s efforts to narrow the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement focus has allowed thousands of criminally convicted illegal immigrants to remain in the country and continue to break laws.
That allegation of an unintended consequence of the president’s immigration policies was the subject of a heated House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday that exposed a widespread failure to identify and remove criminal illegal immigrants.
Deportations have plummeted under the Obama administration as the number of people entering the country illegally has steadily climbed, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations dropped 58 percent between 2009 and 2014, Vaughan told the panel.
The number of criminally convicted illegal immigrants who have faced deportation has fallen by 43 percent since 2012 despite programs, such as enhanced fingerprint screening, that have improved the government’s ability to identify such individuals.
Two of Vaughan’s fellow witnesses shed light on the implications of such trends. Jamiel Shaw, a Los Angeles father, testified on the murder of his son by a so-called “Dreamer,” or a person who was brought into the country illegally as a child and allowed to stay under the Dream Act, while Sacramento resident Michael Ronnebeck testified on the murder of his nephew by an illegal immigrant in Arizona.
In both cases, the suspects had histories of previous criminal charges but were never removed from the country.
Scott Jones, the Sacramento County, Calif., sheriff, told lawmakers the hands-off approach Obama has encouraged Homeland Security officials to take has created a “policy vacuum” that effectively allows states to implement their own interpretations of immigration laws.
“The problem with the current immigration policy can be simply stated as there is no coherent, sustainable immigration policy,” Jones said.
Because California does not require individuals to submit any government documentation to obtain a driver’s license, law enforcement officers have “no confidence” in the identities of the illegal immigrants they arrest, Jones testified.
The uncertainty prevents California — and presumably a number of other states — from keeping track of many illegal immigrants’ criminal histories, he said.
Obama’s policy of removing only those illegals whose crimes make them a top deportation priority, which he imposed through executive action in November 2014, is rendered ineffective for the illegal immigrants whose criminal charges have never been properly documented, Jones noted.
What’s more, Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t share status data and criminal history with local law enforcement agencies, putting police officers at risk, Jones said.
Gregory Chen, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, highlighted the fact that funding for federal immigration enforcement, at an annual average of $18.5 billion over the past five years, has outpaced that of all other criminal law enforcement agencies combined.
Chen said allowing local law enforcement to use discretion when enforcing immigration laws “actually promotes public safety” by encouraging illegal immigrants to report crimes and work with police without fear of deportation.
A number of committee members used the hearing as an opportunity to vent their frustrations with the gridlock that has pushed possible passage of the Homeland Security funding bill to the eleventh hour.
