Immigration Officials on the Hot Seat

A Senate subcommittee will grill Obama administration officials on Thursday over the continuing release of immigrants who commit crime and why deportations are decreasing at the same time Congress has increased spending on border enforcement.

“The Obama administration has ordered immigration officers to ignore plain law and acquiesce to the presence of millions of illegal aliens in the United States.”

The administration has contended that limited resources require the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize illegal immigrants who have committed crimes over those who came into the country but otherwise have abided by the law.

“Yet, rather than truly prioritizing the removal of certain types of aliens over others — which would involve maintaining or increasing the number of aliens removed from year to year — the Obama administration has ordered immigration officers to ignore plain law and acquiesce to the presence of millions of illegal aliens in the United States,” according to a statement from the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest. “As a result, the number of aliens removed from the United States has plummeted in recent years and thousands of otherwise removable aliens have been released from custody.”

The hearing is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. On the hot seat will be a pair of government officials — Thomas Homan, executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Ronald Vitiello, acting chief of the U.S. Border Patrol.

ICE revealed last month that it freed 19,723 criminal aliens, who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them. That included 8,234 violent offenses and 208 homicide convictions.

[lz_table title=”Most Common Offenses of Aliens Released in 2015″ source=”Center for Immigration Studies”]Offense,Convictions
DUI,12307
Traffic offenses,9811
Drugs,7986
Larceny,3535
Immigration offense,3064
[/lz_table]

Also on the witness list for Thursday’s hearing are Brandon Judd, president of the union representing border agents; Mark Kirkorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies; and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Nowrasteh has been a frequent critic of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls. He wrote earlier this month that the think tank exaggerated the extent to which immigrants participate in welfare programs. He also has consistently downplayed the problem posed by illegal immigration.

“The truth is, over the past 15 years, we’ve dramatically increased border enforcement,” he wrote in The Huffington Post in March. “And instead of needing more, we may be going too far already.”

Nowrasteh also maintains that scattershot enforcement policies increase the likelihood of cases like Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino, who, due to clerical errors was released twice after criminal arrests, despite having re-entered the country after a 2004 deportation. Earlier this year, according to law enforcement officials, he killed five people in Kansas and Missouri.

“Our immigration system treats child asylum-seekers and peaceful workers as criminals and treats criminals as minor offenders,” he wrote in The Hill. “If the government deregulated and expanded legal immigration, the unlawful immigrant population would shrink and allow the government to focus entirely on violent and property offenders like Serrano-Vitorino.”

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In an interview, Krikorian said the Obama administration already is taking the approach that Nowrasteh advocates — without eliminating the release of dangerous criminals that are supposedly the administration’s focus.

“If that were true, then we should have seen the results of it already,” he said. “He’s presuming that the administration is actually deporting random people who are not criminals, and in fact, it’s not doing that … There is no kind of law enforcement in which you ignore, entirely, conventional, routine violations of the law and only go after the worst of the worst.”

As for Nowrasteh’s argument that the country has gone too far on border enforcement, Krikorian said the issue is not so much attention to the border but to interior enforcement.

“We’ve already been doing less,” he said. “The number of deportations in the interior, from the interior of the United States, has declined significantly for years under Obama.”