A recent Fox News poll revealed that 63 percent of registered voters support “deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries”. They understand that, media claims notwithstanding, removals of aliens unlawfully here have declined under the Biden-Harris administration — and they’re not happy. Here’s proof, in some simple figures based on DHS’s own statistics, of that decline.
Key Metric. As I’ll explain below, one key metric reveals how effective U.S. immigration enforcement efforts have been: ICE deportations of aliens from within the United States (as opposed to at the border), also known as "interior removals".
Why focus on that metric? Because, by and large, border enforcement is reactive, driven by the efforts of foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally and by the incentives — better known as “pull factors” — drawing them here.
Consequently, removals of aliens apprehended at the border are a poor metric to gauge immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement in the interior, on the other hand, is proactive — it represents the efforts of ICE under each administration to arrest and remove deportable aliens.
Understanding Removals. Traditionally, “removals” or “deportations” meant repatriations of aliens in the interior, who are living in the United States. That was because up until the George W. Bush administration, the policy of Border Patrol and CBP generally had usually been to informally return aliens encountered at the Southwest border to Mexico.
Such returns were relatively easy, because historically most aliens encountered at the border were single adults from Mexico. Mexico has an obligation to accept back its removed nationals, so encountered nationals of that country could simply and quickly be returned through the closest port of entry. And returns require a lot less processing and paperwork than formal removals.
Under Bush, however, DHS shifted to more formal removals of those aliens at the border, as CNN Politics noted in July 2019. That was accelerated in the Obama administration, as my colleague Mark Krikorian explained in August 2019. Krikorian noted that “Obama cooked the books” to boost the number of claimed removals.
Fortunately, available statistics distinguish between artificially inflated border removals and true interior removals. And those statistics tell an interesting story.
ICE Interior Removals. Figure 1 compares ICE interior removals over the past 11 full fiscal years:
Figure 1. ICE Interior Removals by Criminality and Fiscal Year |
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Sources: ICE Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2023; ICE Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2022; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fiscal Year 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations Report; Fiscal Year 2017 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report; ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report, Fiscal Year 2014. |
Prior to FY 2017, ICE failed to distinguish between interior removals involving aliens with pending charges, as opposed to the ones with criminal convictions, so unfortunately all criminal aliens are grouped together in the earlier years. But you can get the gist from Figure 1.
Prior to FY 2014, it was a lot easier for ICE to remove aliens from the United States, because many if not most state and local jurisdictions cooperated with ICE’s interior immigration enforcement efforts. The expansion of the “sanctuary” movement has, unfortunately, closed off much of that cooperation.
That said, most of the decline in ICE interior removals under the Biden-Harris administration is by choice, driven by various non-enforcement policies issued by DHS officials beginning almost immediately after the January 20, 2021, inauguration.
The most prominent of those policies are compiled in guidelines issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in late September 2021 (the “Mayorkas memo”), which purportedly “prioritizes” immigration cases for enforcement to preserve limited resources.
In reality, the Mayorkas memo deliberately places unreasonable and extra-statutory burdens on ICE officers and attorneys attempting to take “enforcement action” (investigation, arrest, detention, prosecution, and removal) against any facially removable aliens — including and especially criminals.
The entire purpose of the Mayorkas memo is to gut immigration enforcement, as I explained shortly after those guidelines were issued, and as Figure 1 amply demonstrates, it’s been eminently successful in that regard.
ICE ERO Non-Detained Docket. The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations directorate (ERO) is responsible both for deporting aliens under final orders of removal and for keeping track of the “docket” of removable aliens pending removal.
The Mayorkas memo has so successfully driven down immigration enforcement — and border releases have been so significant — under the Biden-Harris administration that ERO’s non-detained docket of removable aliens has skyrocketed in the past three years, increasing 90 percent since FY 2020 to just short of 6.2 million cases by the end of FY 2023.
To understand how significantly that docket has mushroomed of late, Figure 2 shows the rise in ERO’s non-detained docket over the past six full fiscal years:
Figure 2. ICE ERO Non-Detained Docket by Fiscal Year |
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Source: ICE Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2023. |
At present, nearly 1.3 million aliens on ICE ERO’s non-detained docket are under final orders of removal, meaning they have received their full due-process rights and are simply awaiting deportation. All of which raises the question of why so few aliens have been removed in the past three years.
Voters understand what the Biden-Harris administration can’t or won’t accept — U.S. immigration laws are meaningless if they aren’t enforced. And if the Fox News poll is correct, nearly two-thirds of the electorate expects their government to start enforcing the immigration laws — and that begins with deportation.