Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has issued new guidelines that protect large classes of illegal aliens from deportation, including farmworkers, the mentally ill, and those who have maintained a “lengthy presence” in the United States.
Mayorkas has stated that being on American soil illegally "should not alone be the basis" for immigration authorities to arrest or deport someone, even though that is what is explicitly stated in the law. So now, many criminal aliens, including those who have committed domestic violence, are protected from deportation.
"Unless the Department of Homeland Security directly identifies you as a threat to national security or a violent criminal, you are pretty much excused from having to obey our immigration laws," Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), summarizes. "As a matter of fact, Secretary Mayorkas made it very clear that, in his opinion, merely being in the country illegally doesn't make one subject to deportation, which is in exact contravention to what the statutes say."
Mehlman points out that the prescribed penalty for being in the country illegally is removal.
"Here you have the secretary of Homeland Security saying ... 'We're just not going to enforce the laws,'" the FAIR spokesman laments. "This has implications far beyond immigration policy. If you have the executive branch essentially nullifying federal laws, then we slip into dictatorship in four-year increments."
Since the Biden administration cannot abolish ICE itself, Mehlman concludes that Secretary Mayorkas has decided to destroy it from within.
