DHS IG Report Says Feds. Lost Track of Aliens Released Into U.S.

According to a new DHS Inspector General report, federal authorities have lost track of potentially hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who crossed into the U.S. over the past year and subsequently failed to turn themselves into ICE once reaching their destination – a condition of their release.

According to the report, Customs and Border Protection failed to record the final addresses of approximately one-third of the aliens released between March and June 2021. During those four months, border authorities encountered more than 720,000 illegal aliens along the southern border.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Many of those migrants failed to report to ICE following their release. Roughly 30 percent of migrants released into the United States between March and September 2021 “did not comply with release terms,” according to the report. All migrants who are not immediately deported must check in at an ICE office within 60 days of their release. Those who fail to provide a U.S. address and schedule an asylum court date are nearly untraceable to law enforcement.

President Biden has set back-to-back records for total border encounters during his first two years in office. Fiscal year 2021 set the record for the highest number of encounters in a single year, with 1,734,686 encounters. However, fiscal year 2022’s year-to-date total has already exceeded that of FY21 with 1,746,119 total encounters.

The article continues:

To deal with the flood, agents began using “ad hoc methods” such as white boards to track the whereabouts of migrants with little success, the report states. The system’s inability to record information for the large swath of migrants crossing the border hamstrung its ability to provide important functions like keeping families with young children together.

Under President Joe Biden, immigration authorities have released up to hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States without court dates. From March to mid-July 2021, roughly 50,000 illegal immigrants were free to live in the United States without a scheduled court date, according to a report from Axios.

However, DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas continues defending his and President Biden’s handling of the border crisis, repeatedly stating,

We inherited a broken and dismantled system already under strain. It is not built to manage the current levels and types of migratory flows. Only Congress can fix this.

You can read the full article here.