A Daily Caller News Foundation reporter described Thursday how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) underreported the number of illegal immigrants released into the U.S. without being tracked.

“We obtained a document that had been given to attendees of a closed door event at ICE last week and this event was to discuss alternatives to detention, which is a program used to track and monitor illegal migrants who are released from custody because the federal government doesn’t have the capacity to keep all of them in their detention centers,” DCNF investigative reporter Jennie Taer told Newsmax host Shaun Kraisman. “So they will give them ankle monitors or a cell phone to be able to check in with ICE.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ICE Is Massively Misreporting How Many Illegal Immigrants Are Being Released With GPS Trackers)

“Now, the numbers on ICE’s website, as you noted, with no tracking, illegal immigrants with no tracking, people were told publicly 266, while that number was close to 50,000 actually and ICE has since updated its website to reflect that,” Taer continued.

The agency has underreported the number of illegal immigrants released into the U.S. without tracking technology by 18,000%, according to an internal document obtained by the DCNF.

WATCH:

ICE also misreported how many illegal immigrants were released into the U.S. with GPS tracking technology, internal documents show. During the closed door event, the agency said that over 8,000 illegal migrants were being tracked with GPS technology, while its website claims nearly 58,000 are being tracked as of Nov. 19.

The agency later corrected the figures in the wake of the DCNF’s reporting.  ICE started the “Alternatives to Detention” program in 2004, due to a lack of detention capacity.

“I think Feere is onto something there and what he means is that ICE has been embracing a number of anti-ICE activists, people that want to abolish the agency, and one big example of this is this event that happened where attendees were given the document with the real numbers of alternatives to detention of illegal immigrants,” Taer said, discussing who attended the seminar. “That event featured an anti-ICE, abolish ICE activist who vocalized in 2019 in a Yale law review journal, he wrote his, you know, blueprint for abolishing the agency.”

The panelist who attended the seminar, Peter Markowitz, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, created a “blueprint” to “allow us to abolish ICE” and recommended during the meeting that the “Alternatives to Detention” program be called “Alternatives to Liberty,” a source familiar with the matter told the DCNF.

“They want them to have more liberty, that’s in their own words, and so this is who ICE is embracing and at the same time, what they’re doing is telling them their correct numbers and leaving the American public in the shadows,” Taer said.

United States Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encountered over 2.3 million migrants in Fiscal Year 2022, with another 230,000 in October, the first month of the new fiscal year, according to official figures. Nearly 600,000 more migrants evaded CBP in fiscal year 2022, Fox News reported.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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