A new chart released by the Senate Subcommittee Immigration and the National Interest, headed by Chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), shows that deportations have declined by 43% in the last three years while the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) budget for the detention and removal of aliens has grown by 25%.
In FY 2012 ICE deported 409,849 aliens on a budget of $2,750,843,000 compared to FY 2015 when ICE deported only 235,413 aliens with a budget of $3,431,444,000. The subcommittee also noted that after the 25% budget increase ICE only removed 139,368 criminal aliens in FY 2015 compared to the 235,390 criminal aliens that were deported in FY 2012, a 41% decrease.
According to the chart above only around 30% of deportations were conducted by ICE in the interior while the majority of deportations were turnbacks at the border, a figure that before Pres. Obama took office was not counted as a deportation.
The Obama administration has repeatedly cited a lack of resources for the decline in deportations but just last year the administration shifted $113 million from the removal and detention budget because, according to Assistant Homeland Security Secretary, Sarah R. Saldana, there were not enough illegal aliens eligible for deportation.
However, the subcommittee’s report says that the Obama administration’s policies are responsible for the huge drop in deportations. “The guise was to assert that the Government lacked the resources to deport more aliens. The former Director of ICE, John Morton, issued a memorandum in March of 2011, in which he outlined ICE’s purported enforcement ‘priorities,’ and claimed that setting such priorities was necessary because ICE ‘only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal alien population in the United States,’” the report states.
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