The Biden administration has claimed for three years its immigration-enforcement policies center more on criminal aliens than its predecessor’s did.
As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it in his 2021 memo, “By exercising our discretionary authority in a targeted way, we can focus our efforts on those who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”
It turns out it’s Team Biden’s policies that threaten America’s well-being.
The Biden administration has dramatically reduced arrests and deportations of criminal aliens, per new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.
Comparing President Donald Trump’s first three years (fiscal years 2017-19) and President Biden’s first three years (fiscal years 2021-23), there’s a 57% decline in criminal-alien arrests and a 67% drop in criminal-alien deportations.
ICE conducted 389,237 arrests and 485,930 deportations of criminal aliens (those with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges) during Trump’s first three years but only 165,650 arrests and 158,931 deportations during Biden’s.
When I was at ICE, I had the agency report criminal-offense data in its annual reports for the first time ever; now that transparency allows for a crime-by-crime comparison between administrations — and the result is deeply troubling from a public-safety perspective.
The rap sheets of criminal aliens arrested in Trump’s first three years included more than 1,542,707 total offenses.
The rap sheets of those arrested in Biden’s first three years included 681,614 total offenses.
That’s a 56% decline and clear evidence the Biden administration has dramatically reduced ICE’s focus on criminal aliens.
. . .