Harris County includes the city of Houston, and a Fox News open records request has revealed that one in every ten inmates in the county jail are on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE hold. An ICE hold is a notice to local law enforcement that the feds intend to take the person into custody, and 43% of 1,170 ICE detainees are being held on violent crime charges including capital murder.
Ira Mehlman is media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
“It seems like a rebuttal of the claim that the illegal immigrants are not committing crimes at higher rates than the native population. You have one out of 10 people in the Harris County lock-up who is in the country illegally, and those who are just the people that ICE has issued detainers for. There are more people who have committed lesser crimes. So that’s a pretty good indication that there is a connection between illegal immigration and crime."
Dangerous if free
Mehlman says these detainees should clearly be kept off the streets.
"Under this administration, under the guidelines put out by Alejandro Mayorkas, if they're issuing ICE detainers, then these are the baddest of the bad guys. Some of them should be facing prison time here in the United States. The penalty for committing a crime in Harris County shouldn't be a plane ticket home. It should be spending a long time in prison, but if these are people that they are going to release, they should be released directly to ICE, not back out onto the streets."
