After Republican congressman Tony Gonzales requested crime statistics, ICE provided him with its own internal data that shows staggering figures.
One example, described in an NBC News story, is 13,000-plus illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. have been convicted of homicide, either in the U.S. or abroad.
Those illegal aliens are on ICE’s “non-detained” docket, meaning many of them are free to roam the U.S. while their immigration case is pending in the back-logged immigration courts. Some of them are serving time in jail or prison, the story said, but others are hiding from ICE and cannot be found.
In a related Fox New story, it pointed out the statistics show more than 425,400 convicted criminals are not in ICE detention. Of that number, approximately 222,100 have pending criminal charges.
The total number of illegal aliens in the U.S., who should be deported by court order but remain free, is more than 7 million, the ICE data shows.
P.J. Lechleitner, the acting director of ICE, sent the data in response to a request Rep. Gonzales made in March, now seven months ago.
The ICE statistics “dispel any notion” the United States government is investigating and vetting illegal aliens before allowing them to enter our country, Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN.
“It dispels any notion,” he adds, “that illegal immigration does not result in crime and needless suffering on the part of the American public.”
The ICE letter to Rep. Gonzalez also criticized so-called “sanctuary cities” in the U.S. Those are Democrat-run cities where local law enforcement is blocked from cooperating with ICE to locate and arrest illegal aliens in their city limits.
Hit with their own statistics from the federal government, the Biden administration has downplayed the figures since Lechleitner released them to the Texas lawmaker.
In a statement to the news media, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said:
The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes people who entered the country over the past 40 year or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.
Attempting to pin some of the blame on Donald Trump, some unnamed Biden officials have told the news media the statistics did not skip the tough-on-immigration Trump administration.
