The Biden administration has delayed for months an annual illegal immigration report that contains crucial statistics about this key national security issue, as the U.S. border crisis keeps breaking records since Joe Biden took the presidential office. . . .
The Biden administration has published some immigration enforcement statistics in its “ICE Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report.” This was recently required by Congress and is largely a narrative-driven report that provides a topical look at all parts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), from customs operations to personnel hiring and oversight processes.
It is significantly different from the detailed immigration enforcement-focused report called the “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” that the agency has published by the end of every calendar year for at least the last decade — with the exception of last year. As of this writing, the Biden administration has without explanation yet to publish this very important report, leading some to conclude that the data contained therein is a damning indictment of the administration’s enforcement policies. (Here’s the fiscal year 2020 version).
The recently released report does not include the many charts and tables that make up the missing enforcement report, effectively preventing Congress, the media, and the public from analyzing the effects of the Biden administration’s controversial guidelines that have severely limited the ability of ICE officers to enforce immigration law. Instead, the report includes only a handful of numbers and percentages, and messaging that is difficult to verify. Perhaps most troubling is that the Biden administration decided to develop a largely meaningless metric that is meant to trick people into thinking the Biden administration is taking public safety more seriously than the Trump administration.
In the new report they claim that ICE “arrested 12,025 individuals with aggravated felony convictions—nearly double the 6,815 arrested the previous fiscal year” and “ICE removed an average of 937 aggravated felons per month — the highest level ever recorded since ICE began collecting detailed criminality data.” One ICE officer I spoke with calls this “a complete manipulation of the data” and many ICE officers share that sentiment, including an officer interviewed by the Washington Times, who said, “I can tell you definitively there were more aggravated felony arrests in 2020.”
The Biden administration’s attempt to put a positive spin on its dangerous enforcement guidelines through this unreliable data is more troubling than most realize. . . .
[Read the whole thing at The Federalist.]