Slightly more than 55,000 deportable aliens were removed from the U.S. in FY 2021; more than half of those were removed during the first four months of that period, while Donald Trump was still in office. That left approximately 27,000 removed over the next eight months – at a rate barely 100 per day – under President Biden.
The historically low total (55,590) is roughly a fifth of the annual removals carried out in FYs 2017-2019, and about one-third of the total for FY 2020. Those stats are according to long-delayed preliminary data quietly released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) says under Biden, ICE has been effectively rendered useless.
"Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas, who runs the Department of Homeland Security, has basically said that we're not going to arrest and deport anybody who's not a violent criminal or a terrorist," Mehlman explains to AFN. "And even then, there are very limited places where ICE can actually go after them."
"So, if we were to fast-forward a year from now when the FY 2022 data come out, that 55,590 is probably going to look like a big number."
FAIR president Dan Stein says what the Biden administration has done is "implement the radical Left's goal of abolishing ICE" – and Biden's DHS, according to Mehlman, has shown no inclination to change course.
"They understand that the policies that they have in place are deeply unpopular with the American public. They can read polls just like the rest of us," the FAIR spokesman says. "But they're going all in on this policy. They don't seem to care what the consequences are – not just politically for them but the consequences for the American public in terms of safety, security, health … all those things that the American public is concerned about."
Mehlman says the new data confirms what many Americans already knew: President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas are not "judiciously enforcing" U.S. immigration laws; instead, they are "willfully and unilaterally nullifying" those laws, in defiance of their sworn oaths of office.
