President Barack Obama is allowing 167,000 foreign criminals to live freely in the United States, even though their deportation hearings and appeals have been completed, according to an internal agency report.
The data was revealed in a weekly report prepared by officers in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The Sept. 22 report, titled “Weekly Departures and Detention Report,” was leaked to the non-profit Center for Immigration Studies.
“This is ICE’s own unfiltered record that provides a benchmark of immigration enforcement, and so anybody who views this document can see what is actually happening… not filtered by ICE’s press office,” CIS Policy Director Jessica Vaughan told The Daily Caller.
Obama’s effort to reduce enforcement “makes a joke of or immigration law, and it creates an incentive for people to come [illegally]… the surge of [136,000] Central Americans that we’ve seen over the last year is proof of that,” she said.
In practice, “the president can drive it down as far as he wants, as long as nobody tries to stop him,’ she said.
“Unless Congress begins to insert itself, and insist that the funds ICE is receiving for immigration enforcement are used appropriately,” she added.
The Sept. 20 report shows that officials have not deported 897,572 illegals who have been given a final deportation order by immigration courts. That 900,000 includes the 167,000 foreign criminals who have been ordered out of the country by courts, after their convictions for felony or misdemeanors.
The convictions include assaults, theft, murder, identity theft, domestic battery and obstruction of justice. The convictions usually do not include reckless driving and other driving-related offenses, unless a state’s courts treat them as serious crimes.
The 900,000 resident deportees are part of the larger population of 12 million illegal immigrants that Obama’s agencies are protecting from deportation under the so-called “prosecutorial discretion” policy.
That protection includes rollbacks in ICE arrests and a sharp reduction in deportations of people who had either recently crossed the border or who were living illegally inside the United States.
In September, White House officials suggested the policy might be expanded after the election to provide work permits to millions of illegal immigrants. That “executive action” amnesty policy is unpopular among voters, partly because it would allow the illegals to compete against Americans for jobs.
The still-vague executive action plan is begin applauded by progressives and business leaders, who want more workers and customers.
The total number of deportations handled by ICE dropped 15 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to the ICE document.
But there was a much steeper drop in ICE-managed deportations of illegals living in the United States, far from the border. Those interior deportations dropped 34 percent from 2013 to 2104, putting them 58 percent lower than the deportation number in 2009.
In 2014, for example, only 100,000 illegals —- including many criminals — were deported from the interior of the country.
That’s less than 1 percent of the illegal population.
“This is a stealth amnesty,” Vaughan said.
Obama’s decision to provide “Immunity from enforcement… is the next best thing to full amnesty,” she said.
In response to critics, Obama’s deputies say they’re trying to focus enforcement efforts on foreign criminals.
But the number of foreign criminals who were repatriated fell from 23 percent in 2013 to 2014, and are now 39 percent lower than the 2011 level.
“ICE officers are instructed to release or take a pass on illegal aliens whose crimes are designated as ‘minor’ or who have family members in the United States,” according to a statement from the CIS.
“The result is that only a fraction of deportable aliens that ICE identifies actually will be processed for deportation,” CIS said.
ICE officers are also instructed to ignore many foreign criminals. According to the report, “ICE officers had reported 170,125 encounters with aliens deemed a criminal threat,” said CIIS. But “only 90,500 criminal aliens were issued charging documents, indicating a startlingly large number — potentially nearly 80,000 — of illegal aliens with criminal histories who were able to escape deportation proceedings in 2014, even after being encountered by an ICE officer.”
The enforcement rollbacks has allowed the population of 167,000 foreign criminals to stay in the country.
“That’s just a damming indictment of the dysfunction in our immigration system,” Vaughan said.
“They’ve had their due process, they’ve exhausted their appeals, but they’re still here.”
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