DHS deported less than 1% of catch-and-release migrants since start of Biden administration

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The Homeland Security Department has caught and released more than 2.1 million illegal immigrants at the southern border since the start of the Biden administration.

Less than 1% of them had immigration court hearings and were deported, the House Judiciary Committee said Monday in a report challenging the government’s assertions that it is “promptly” removing the wave of people arriving at the border.

Using Homeland Security’s data, the committee delivered the most comprehensive look to date at the border chaos. The report examines who has crossed illegally, how many have been released and how the administration has struggled to deal with the migrants once they are in the U.S.

The data indicates that migrants are incredibly difficult to dislodge once they move beyond the border.

The report also suggests that few of the immigrants are asylum-seekers. Those who attempt to use the asylum process are generally ruled to have bogus claims and are ordered deported. There again, Homeland Security struggles to find and oust them, the report said.

The committee staff report called the data staggering and said it undercuts Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ appeal for would-be migrants not to attempt the journey to the U.S. because they will be caught and removed.

“These data contradict Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’s statements that the southwest border is closed and that illegal aliens are ‘quickly’ removed,” the report said. “Instead, with more than 99 percent of illegal aliens staying inside the United States after being released by the Biden administration, there is virtually no enforcement of our immigration laws.”

According to the numbers:

• Customs and Border Protection agents and officers encountered 4,670,695 unauthorized migrants at the southern border from Jan. 20, 2021, through March 31, 2023.

• Roughly half were expelled under the Title 42 pandemic border policy and some were detained, but 2,148,738 migrants were released.

• Of those, just 79,059 had their immigration court cases started and 10,229 had final rulings. Only 11% were granted asylum by a judge, and 61% were ordered deported. The vast majority of those were still in the U.S.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tasked with tracking and deporting migrants from inside the U.S., has struggled to keep up with processing the new arrivals.

The committee, which spoke with regional ICE leaders, said officers had been pulled from the field for desk work. That means they were not out looking for migrants ignoring deportation orders.

Officers on the streets have been hamstrung by a Biden policy prohibiting them from making arrests near schools, hospitals, churches, playgrounds and other sensitive locations, the Republican committee report said, citing ICE officials’ closed-door testimony.

Homeland Security referred questions about the report to the White House, which blasted the committee’s work as a “so-called report” and called it “full of lies from House Republicans who continue to play politics while sabotaging President Biden’s work to ramp up enforcement and personnel at the border.”

The White House said Mr. Biden has asked for money to add more Border Patrol agents and deploy new technology to detect illegal drugs, but Congress has not acted on the request. Even so, the administration has ordered 800 active-duty troops to the border, added detention beds to CBP’s border facilities and recently announced an effort to deport Venezuelans.

The White House suggested that deportations have accelerated since the March 31 cutoff date for the numbers in the House committee report.

Since the Title 42 pandemic border expulsion policy ended in May, Homeland Security has ousted nearly 300,000 migrants either through formal deportation or voluntary return. The White House said that rate is higher than in 2019, the last comparable period before the pandemic, during the Trump administration.

The Judiciary Committee relied on data that Homeland Security provided after prodding from Capitol Hill.

It shows that Homeland Security caught and released 310,379 illegal immigrants at the southern border in fiscal year 2021. In 2020, that rose to 777,283. Over the first 10 months of fiscal year 2023, stretching from October through July, it released 929,496.

Those figures don’t include hundreds of thousands of other migrants who were sent from the border to other federal agencies before their release. That category includes unaccompanied illegal immigrant children sent to the Health and Human Services Department for placement with sponsors.

The Judiciary Committee challenged the notion that the migrants are “asylum-seekers” entitled to protection in the U.S., as claimed by Democrats on Capitol Hill and big-city mayors such as Eric Adams in New York. According to the data, just 6% of the migrants released into the U.S. were even screened for persecution, which is the standard for claiming asylum.

Worse yet, nearly half of migrants who were screened and deemed not to be asylum candidates were still in the U.S. as of March 31, according to the committee’s data.

More than two-thirds lost their cases after going through the process and having their full asylum claims processed. Yet a majority weren’t removed, the committee said.

Homeland Security, in a written response to questions from Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican, said migrants it hasn’t been able to remove are generally citizens of countries such as Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, where governments either refuse or struggle to cooperate with deportation requests from the U.S., or from Eastern Hemisphere countries where ICE struggles to put together deportation flights.

“DHS has worked and continues to increase its capacity to conduct repatriation flights of removable noncitizens, including through an increased cadence of diplomatic engagements with international partners to secure agreement to accept removal flights, provide travel documents, and streamline requirements,” the department told the committee in its reply to Mr. Gaetz’s questions.