The Department of Homeland Security received reports of more than 3 million foreigners who overstayed their visas and became illegal immigrants during the Biden administration, but it investigated fewer than a thousand of those cases and only made eight arrests, the department’s inspector general said.
The inspector general blamed a 2021 policy change that ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pass on most investigations, only targeting those deemed to be “national security” or “public safety” threats.
The audit said ICE also lacked resources and, in the rare instances when it did investigate, it had trouble locating the visitors at the addresses where they said they’d be.
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“As a result, foreign nationals who potentially posed threats to the United States remained at large despite their illegal status,” the audit found.
ICE said in an official response that it ditched the Biden guidance and now considers anyone in the country beyond their legal time to be a candidate for investigation and deportation.
“ICE’s current operational priorities, resource posture, and enforcement approach are now aligned with the policies of the current administration,” Beth Baden, ICE’s chief financial officer, said in the agency’s official response.
The 2021 policy was the Biden administration’s attempt to carve most illegal immigrants out of any serious danger of being deported. It declared that unless an illegal immigrant was deemed a security risk or had newly snuck across the border, he or she was a low priority.
Customs and Border Protection identified 3,145,375 people who came on legal visas but were thought to have remained beyond their visa’s expiration from fiscal year 2021 to 2024.
Of those, ICE deemed just 21,885 to be viable priority cases — or less than 1%. And nearly all of those came in 2021.
Even after they were labeled priority cases, ICE still didn’t do much.
The inspector general said ICE actually carried out fewer than 500 investigations and made just eight arrests.
“ICE conducted few nonimmigrant overstay lead-initiated investigations and arrested even fewer foreign nationals who stayed beyond or violated the terms of their admission,” the inspector general said.
There were cases where ICE did want to make an arrest but lost track of the migrant.
That included one case where a Jamaican migrant came on a business-tourism visa in June 2021, stayed beyond his term’s expiration in December 2021, then pled guilty to being a criminal in possession of a weapon.
ICE can’t locate the migrant anymore, the audit said.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the findings showed that the Biden administration knowingly ignored thousands of cases they, themselves, had labeled as priorities.
“The degree of the Biden administration’s dereliction of duty, which needlessly put American lives at risk, is staggering and enraging,” Mr. Mullin said in a statement.
Homeland Security pointed to migrants who overstayed their visas and went on to commit serious crimes.
That list included Shaqiuel Sheldon Williams, an illegal alien from Jamaica who stayed beyond his January 2024 visa expiration date. This past August, he was arrested in Florida and accused of stabbing two people at a Burger King.
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