GOP members of Congress want to deport as many illegal immigrants as possible to manage the impacts of the border crisis on the interior of the U.S., several told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida, Mark Green of Tennessee, and Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be able to go out and arrest individuals for the sole reason that they’re illegally present in the country, they told the DCNF.
The Biden administration changed ICE’s priorities to only arrest and deport individuals deemed threats to national security, public safety and border security.
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“This is the unfortunate tragedy of Joe Biden’s strategy. His strategy is to just bring a deluge of people into the country around our immigration law. So, unfortunately, what you’re really going to have to do at some point if people ignore their court hearings, you’re gonna have to deport them,” Donalds told the DCNF.
While U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had a record of more than 2.3 million migrant encounters at the southern border in fiscal year 2022, ICE removed roughly 72,000 illegal aliens, compared to roughly 185,000 in fiscal year 2020, when migrant encounters were lower.
Ahead of the Trump-era expulsion order Title 42’s end on May 11, ICE instructed personnel to begin releasing illegal immigrants from detention who have been found to have a credible fear, according to an internal agency memo recently obtained exclusively by the DCNF.
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“I think ICE should be able to do its job as under federal law,” Donalds said.
Green, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, believes in order to ramp up interior immigration enforcement, the White House needs to be the one to implement it.
“If they have an order to be removed from the country by a court, they ought to be removed. That’s a court decision that’s been made by a judge and those should start there,” Green said.
“To fix this, ultimately, it’s going to take an administration change because they’re absolutely ideologically trying to get as many people, they want the entire world to come live in the United States. And it’s not feasible, it’s not sustainable,” Green said.
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Kelly, who is a co-founder of the Northern Border Security Caucus, believes that even if they want to deport illegal immigrants in higher numbers, it will ultimately be impossible to track them all down.
“Where ICE is, they’re undermanned and overloaded. What it really comes down to if a person’s entry into the United States, the first thing they do is break whatever laws, that doesn’t bode well for the future. I don’t know that we can get to them all to find out exactly who they are and where they came from and what their intentions are,” Kelly told the DCNF.
“It bothers me that we’ve allowed it to happen, we’ve watched it take place,” Kelly said.
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