One week after Senate Republicans rejected White House-backed legislation that would have sent $3.7 billion to bail out sanctuary cities while also mandating the catch and release of all migrants arrested for illegally entering America from Mexico, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials threatened to release thousands more migrants into the U.S. by slashing capacity to detain them at the border.
This unveiled threat by President Joe Biden is despicable, but is also laughably empty, for the cuts he is threatening are to the exact levels his administration sought in his last budget.
Biden’s plan to deal with budget shortfalls at ICE, caused entirely by his misgovernment of the border, is just a rehash of how he wanted to deploy ICE resources in the first place.
When Biden became president, ICE could detain more than 55,000 migrants at one time. Immediately upon taking office, Biden began dismantling this detention capacity to just 29,000 beds. He has sought to lower it further, requesting 25,000 detention beds in each of his last two budget requests.
Instead of detaining migrants, Biden prefers to release them into the country. In the final year before Biden came into office, the Department of Homeland Security issued just 200,000 “Notices to Appear” to migrants arrested at the border. These notices begin the deportation process and are the documents most commonly given to migrants when they are released into the country.
Under Biden, the number of notices rose to more than 500,000 in 2021 and to almost 1 million in 2022. Data for 2023 are not yet available, but notices probably approached 2 million.
Throughout this rapid rise, Biden has asked for fewer detention beds. The recently rejected border legislation would have raised the number of ICE beds from 25,000 to 46,000, but nothing would have forced Biden to use them and detain more migrants.
Quite the opposite.
Instead of forcing Biden to detain migrants, the deal would have mandated their release through new “noncustodial removal proceedings.” They would have been placed in ICE’s existing “alternatives to detention” program, which has made the crisis worse.
The alternative detention program doesn’t guarantee the arrest, detention, and removal of migrants. An immigration judge or asylum officer could order the removal of a migrant, but the order does not force ICE to find, arrest, detain, process, and finally deport any migrant. And Biden does not track illegal immigrants unless they have committed other offenses.
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Biden is understandably upset that Senate Republicans blocked his bailout. Leaders of Chicago, Denver, and New York will now continue to pressure him to change policies and stanch the flow of migrants overrunning their communities.
This process is painful for Biden and the Democrats. But threatening to release more migrants into the country is not only an empty threat, but would make the situation in sanctuary cities even worse.