Thursday, March 31, 2022

The Biden Administration Is Cooking The Books On Illegal Immigrant Arrests: The Biden administration is attempting to put a positive spin on its dangerous enforcement guidelines through unreliable data

The Biden administration has delayed for months an annual illegal immigration report that contains crucial statistics about this key national security issue, as the U.S. border crisis keeps breaking records since Joe Biden took the presidential office.
The Biden administration has published some immigration enforcement statistics in its “ICE Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report.” This was recently required by Congress and is largely a narrative-driven report that provides a topical look at all parts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), from customs operations to personnel hiring and oversight processes.
It is significantly different from the detailed immigration enforcement-focused report called the “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” that the agency has published by the end of every calendar year for at least the last decade — with the exception of last year. As of this writing, the Biden administration has not published this very important report, leading some to conclude that the data contained therein is a damning indictment of the administration’s enforcement policies. (Here’s the fiscal year 2020 version).
The recently released report does not include the many charts and tables that make up the missing enforcement report, effectively preventing Congress, the media, and the public from analyzing the effects of the Biden administration’s controversial guidelines that have severely limited the ability of ICE officers to enforce immigration law. Instead, the report includes only a handful of numbers and percentages, and messaging that is difficult to verify. Perhaps most troubling is that the Biden administration decided to develop a largely meaningless metric that is meant to trick people into thinking the Biden administration is taking public safety more seriously than the Trump administration.
In the new report they claim that ICE “arrested 12,025 individuals with aggravated felony convictions—nearly double the 6,815 arrested the previous fiscal year” and “ICE removed an average of 937 aggravated felons per month — the highest level ever recorded since ICE began collecting detailed criminality data.” One ICE officer I spoke with calls this “a complete manipulation of the data” and many ICE officers share that sentiment, including an officer interviewed by the Washington Times, who said, “I can tell you definitively there were more aggravated felony arrests in 2020.”
The Biden administration’s attempt to put a positive spin on its dangerous enforcement guidelines through this unreliable data is more troubling than most realize.
Misleading on Aggravated Felony Reporting
For purposes of immigration, Congress defines a number of crimes as “aggravated felonies,” such as murder, rape, and drug trafficking, but also considers a crime to fit in this category if it is “a crime of violence” or a “theft offense or burglary offense” for which the term of imprisonment is at least one year. The list is detailed and how states define and punish crimes creates some complexity in the law. Aliens convicted of aggravated felonies face a number of consequences including swift deportation, ineligibility for asylum, and a bar from lawfully re-entering the United States.
Over the past year, as confirmed by ICE officers who spoke with the Center for Immigration Studies, the Biden administration has repeatedly directed ICE field offices to mark arrests as “aggravated felon arrests” at every opportunity, where applicable. The program ICE officers use to create a system of record for managing cases allows for the entry of large amounts of information, ranging from basic information like name, birth date, and nationality to more complex information like criminal and immigration history. As with any system, too much information can be problematic (either for efficiency or legal reasons, for example) and officers generally put as much information as is sufficient for carrying out their responsibilities, which is, generally, either the removal or release of a foreign national.
Read the rest from Jon Feere HERE

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