One of President Biden’s first official acts was to suspend investigations, arrests, and deportations of nearly all illegal aliens – including criminal aliens, who make up the vast majority of ICE cases — for at least the next 100 days. In a memo sent on January 20 to all immigration agency heads, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske announced the deportation freeze and new enforcement priorities that in effect bring interior enforcement to a near stop. These restrictions are even tighter than those adopted (with disastrous results) by the Obama administration, and make the country a sanctuary not only for criminal aliens, but all who are here in defiance of our laws.
President Biden has said that he doesn’t support “abolishing ICE,” but apparently he does support abolishing immigration enforcement.
According to the memo, zero new deportations will take place in the next 100 days, and only certain narrow categories of illegal aliens will be subject to enforcement after that: national security threats; recent illegal border crossers (those who arrived illegally after November 1, 2020); and so-called aggravated felons, a term of art that generally means the most serious or very violent offenders.
The official justification for this stoppage is to allow for a surge of resources to the border, “in order to ensure safe, legal and orderly processing, to rebuild fair and effective asylum procedures that respect human rights and due process, to adopt appropriate public health guidelines and protocols, and to prioritize responding to threats to national security, public safety, and border security.”
This gives the impression that ICE and other enforcement officers will be sent to help out at the southwest border, but in reality they are being told to sit on their hands and not do their jobs.
One ICE officer told me the memo was “concerning and confusing.” The officer said, “We’ve already been operating at a very reduced level since COVID. But this will probably bring enforcement to a near stop. Even Obama didn’t go this far.”
The new orders apply to every enforcement action contemplated by every immigration enforcement agency, including the Border Patrol, and including the range of “discretionary” decisions such as “whom to stop, question, and arrest; whom to detain or release; whether to settle, dismiss, appeal, or join in a motion on a case; and whether to grant deferred action or parole.”
In practice, this means that ICE must release criminal aliens and others in custody who do not meet the new priorities. This will include aliens convicted of domestic violence, sex offenders, drunk drivers, theft causing loss of less than $10,000, vehicular homicide, an infinite number of misdemeanor crimes, and much more.
It means that when USCIS refuses green cards or other benefits due to fraud, the bogus applicants will get to stay anyway.
It means that in the next 100 days, if a local police officer arrests a previously deported gang member, even one with a serious criminal history, for a new crime that is not an aggravated felony, ICE will not be able to take action to remove that gang member again. One ICE officer told me that the lack of action on these deportable offenders would erode relationships with local law enforcement agencies that they have cultivated over the years.
Reportedly, ICE was planning an operation for February to go after sex offenders, but it’s been scrapped because most of the targets do not clearly meet these priorities, especially in California, where offenders routinely get to plead down to far lesser charges, especially if it helps them avoid deportation.
Both the freeze and the extreme limitations on ICE are drastic and unprecedented. In 2018, only about 15 percent of the criminal aliens removed from the interior were classified as aggravated felons, and only 12 percent of all deported aliens. Even those non-aggravated felons caused serious problems; they had convictions for nearly every other crime on the books, including assault, burglary, child molestation, drug offenses, weapons offenses, fraud, and much, much more.
Biden’s order is a reckless experiment that is bound to have a human cost. But some state leaders don’t want to find out the hard way exactly what happens under a deportation moratorium. Texas already has filed a lawsuit, citing the significant costs to Texas taxpayers of dealing with illegal aliens that the federal government neglects to remove, not to mention a formal agreement Texas has with the feds to provide notice and consultation before any major policy changes.
Between this freeze on ICE and the resurgence of the caravans, it’s hard to see how anyone will have an appetite to discuss the mass amnesty and legal immigration expansion that Biden hopes to accomplish.