In a country where illegal immigration is pretty much allowed on demand, this is kinda sorta not all that surprising:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drafted plans to release thousands of immigrants and slash its capacity to hold detainees after the failure of a Senate border bill that would have erased a $700 million budget shortfall, according to four officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
Yes. That's right. ICE is going to approach thousands of illegal immigrants it already has in detention and basically be like:
That "Senate border bill" from last week, you may recall, was an absolute flaming piece of garbage:
Its provisions included $20 billion for "border security" which really meant opening the border to 1.8 million illegal crossers a year, essentially enshrining a catch-and-release policy and paying for lawyers for illegal immigrants.
So our options here are allowing illegal immigrants to cross our border unimpeded or allowing ICE to just release all the immigrants they've already collared?
What a lineup of choices!
Note that the problem will be one not merely of detention but of future capacity:
The bill's demise has led ICE officials to begin circulating an internal proposal to save money by releasing thousands of detainees and cutting detention levels from 38,000 beds to 22,000.
The "major reduction in ICE detention capacity would be likely to lead to more deportation-eligible migrants getting released from U.S. custody along the border," ICE officials told the Washington Post. So the problem will just compound on itself.
And that the shift is looming as the House impeaches DHS Secretary Mayorkas:
Border crossings, meanwhile, remain at record levels:
It's basically all chaos on the border, in other words!
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