White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre downplayed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shared with Congress last week that found more than 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide, either in the United States or abroad, are not in federal detention.
Jean-Pierre criticized reporting of the data as a “false representation” of the facts, contending it was “important to correct the record” and “call that out.”
But when asked what was false about the reporting, the press secretary told reporters that if they were to “look at the total returns and removal of the past year, that has been higher than every year under the previous administration since 2010.”
The ICE data do not specify when the convicted criminal immigrants crossed the border, and a 2016 Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report found there were 368,000 similar immigrants who were not detained by ICE. As of July this year, there were 435,719.
Jean-Pierre was also pushed on the administration’s decision to expand President Joe Biden‘s border executive order reducing the number of asylum-seeker applications accepted by the federal government when there are 2,500 illegal crossings a day. DHS announced a new rule Monday that the restrictions can only be rolled back when the daily numbers of crossings is 1,500 or less for a month rather than a week, as was introduced in June.
“We have tried to do this in a way where there was legislative action, right?” the press secretary said. “This announcement that you just — that we just had about the final rule, it was a two-month process. Let’s not forget when the president made the announcement in June, DHS and [the Department of Justice] had a two month process, right? To get feedback, to get responses on the rule. And now we have … now we secured that final rule.”
“Majority of Americans want us to fix the border,” she added. “They do, and we tried. And this is the path that where we went down because Republicans in Congress didn’t want to work with us.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris announced she supported tougher restrictions at the border than those implemented by Biden this summer during a campaign trip to Douglas, Arizona, last week.
“Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years,” she said. “We will pursue more severe criminal charges against repeat violators. And if someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum.”