Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration
CIS director tells Senate hearing that collapse in enforcement is a policy choice by the White House
14:30 ET from Center for Immigration Studies
WASHINGTON, May 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest examines the declining deportations and increasing criminal alien releases under the Obama administration. The hearing takes place just weeks after the subcommittee heard that despite the tremendous growth of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) budget for detention and removal, the total number of aliens removed had plummeted.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, testifies at the hearing that the Obama administration's "radical new approach to immigration law" has resulted in more than a 70 percent decline in deportations from the interior and over a 50 percent decline in the removal of criminal aliens.
Krikorian attributes the evisceration of immigration enforcement on the Obama administration's transformation, by executive fiat, of violation of immigration law into a "secondary offense." His testimony explains that "This extra-legal shift in the conception of the immigration statute has been misleadingly packaged as 'prosecutorial discretion' . . . What the Obama administration has done is use discretion as a pretext for simply exempting the vast majority of immigration violators from any possibility of legal consequences."
Krikorian describes the egregious crimes committed by many of the approximately 85,000 criminal aliens who have been released from custody and blames the public safety costs, in part, on the administration's termination of the successful Secure Communities program. Criminal aliens are being released into our communities rather than being released because the new Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) suppresses enforcement.
The testimony concludes with a quote from the former Democratic congresswoman and civil rights pioneer, Barbara Jordan:
Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.
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