Tom Homan on border policy: 'The Biden administration has proven there is no deterrence'
Former ICE director Tom Homan on the 2021 record-breaking level of southern border crossings.
The Biden administration implementing an immigration agenda that is causing great damage to our country, and it is increasingly attempting to hide and manipulate the data that reveals the extent of that damage.
A long-awaited 2021 annual report on the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was released last week after a long delay. I have opined many times that there is no good reason for the delay other than that the administration is trying to hide and spin the numbers. This is being done because the raw data would reveal that the Biden administration has severely limited ICE operations and mission, resulting in more public safety threats from illegal aliens not being arrested, detained, or removed.
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Mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents watch Haitian immigrants on the bank of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 20, 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images)
After reading the report, I now understand why the release was delayed. The administration must have crunched the numbers every way possible and decided to show the data by calendar year instead of the usually reported fiscal year. To show any increase in arrests, it had to play with past several years numbers to average out the data—which has never been done.
I oversaw this report for many years during my time at ICE. The Biden administration can try to spin and hide the truth from taxpayers, but it cannot fool me. It does not want to show the data on which agency made the arrests that led to removals of illegal aliens because it would show that a large number of the extremely low 59,011 removals were actually border patrol arrests—not ICE arrests.
The number of removals in the current report is the lowest number in the history of ICE. You would have to go back to 1995, when the old Immigration and Naturalization (INS) was still in existence, to find a number that low. Worse, out of those 59,011 removals conducted by ICE, more than half were done under the Trump administration. That administration performed more removals in four months that Biden’s did in eight.
While Biden’s appointees are trying to sugarcoat this report, some of these numbers cannot be spun. Among them are that ICE arrests of illegal aliens in 2021 for crimes including homicide-related offenses, sexual assaults, robberies, and kidnappings were all down significantly from the previous two years.
Another alarming revelation in the report is "34 [deported criminals] were designated as known or suspected terrorists." However, the Biden administration has said there is no evidence of known or suspected terrorists crossing the southern border. Our country is facing enough instability right now. Who will Biden blame if someone who entered the country illegally through our wide-open border commits an act of mass terror?
This administration can try to hide, duck and spin, but the data is what it is. Our country is less safe. More criminals who are in the country illegally are walking the streets in our neighborhoods. This is an outrage and should not be tolerated by any American.
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In the first year of the Biden administration, we saw an historic illegal immigration crisis where over 2 million people entered our country illegally and in that same year, ICE has the fewest removals in the history of the Agency. It’s not mismanagement and it’s not incompetence. This is by design.
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But you can’t have national security if you don’t have border security. Border security is far less effective if you don’t have interior enforcement, and the Biden administration has effectively killed it.
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