A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official will testify to the House Judiciary Committee Thursday that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ goal is to implement policies that ultimately “limit immigration enforcement,” according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Former ICE Field Office Director John Fabbricatore, who served more than two decades in the federal government and is now an advisory board member at the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE), a group that backs Republican calls to impeach Biden’s DHS secretary, will testify to Mayorkas’ efforts to limit ICE arrests and deportations in making arrests and detaining illegal immigrants.
Fabbricatore’s testimony focuses on key statistics showing how ICE enforcement has been limited under Mayorkas’ leadership, including a roughly 69% drop in civil arrests by the agency between fiscal year 2018 and 2022. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: House GOP Is About To Drop A Massive Report Alleging That Biden’s DHS Chief Broke The Law)
ICE arrests of illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals dropped 65% comparing fiscal year 2018 and 2022, according to data in Fabbricatore’s testimony.
“Based on these statistics, is there any conclusion that can be drawn by a logical, reasonable person, other than that the real goal of these priorities is to limit immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States, regardless of the risk to public safety and national security that the illegal alien poses?” the testimony states.
Mayorkas announced limits to ICE arrests in September 2021, shifting the agency to only target those deemed as threats to U.S. “national security, public safety, and border security.” Republican states subsequently sued over the priorities, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court, which recently sided with the Biden administration.
Mayorkas argued that the Biden administration had to limit ICE enforcement due to a lack of agency resources.
“In fact, the entire premise put forth by Secretary Mayorkas is false. The statistics show the exact opposite result that he swore his policies were going to produce. These aren’t my words – these are his own statistics! There are fewer arrests and fewer serious criminals being arrested. Plain and simple. And we’re into the third year of these policies – if he was really concerned about getting criminals off the street and out of the country, and he’s seen two-plus years of the opposite result, wouldn’t he change them?” Fabbricatore’s testimony states.
REUTERS/Veronica G. Cardenas
Fabbricatore’s testimony also outlines how “there are hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of criminal aliens at large in the United States.”
“President Biden’s own FY 2024 Budget Justification clearly stated that there were over 400,000 convicted criminals on the non-detained docket,” Fabbricatore’s testimony states. “Why are these criminal aliens not detained and removed? At the same time, funded detention beds remain empty, with average daily populations at record lows (19,461 in FY 2021 and 22,360 in FY 2022).”
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