DALLAS (AP) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested fewer people during the 2019 budget year than last year, in part because resources were shifted to help handle the massive surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, the agency said Wednesday.
And the average number of immigrants in detention was 50,165 — even though Congress limits funding to cover just 45,000.
"There is no doubt that the border crisis, coupled with the unwillingness of some local jurisdictions that choose to put politics over public safety, has made it more difficult for ICE to carry out its congressionally mandated interior enforcement mission," acting director Matt Albence said.
Enforcement and removal officers with ICE — a Homeland Security agency — arrest and detain immigrants who are deemed to be in the U.S. illegally. Over the budget year that ended Sept. 30, officers arrested about 143,000 people, about 13,000 less than last year, and deported more than 267,000. More than 92,000 of the arrests were of people with criminal convictions, Albence said, including for homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault and assault.
ICE officers were diverted to help with the border crisis, which affected overall arrests, Albence said at a news conference in Dallas, where the largest number of arrests occurred — 16,900 — and where there's a high level of cooperation with local law enforcement. Local law enforcement do not help ICE in so-called sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago.
Nearly 300 of the Dallas-area arrests were made in April during a raid at a technology company — one of the largest such enforcement actions in a decade
There was a drastic increase in the number of families crossing the border last year — at least 473,000 for the budget year, nearly three times the previous full-year record for families. Most were coming from Central America.
While the numbers surged, Homeland Security agents and officers were overwhelmed because families with small children require much more care. There were nearly 1 million crossings from the early 2000s, but those were mostly single men from Mexico who were easily returned.
Border officers pleaded for help but it wasn't until the summer, when reports of squalid conditions and surging numbers of detainees and children dying were published, that Congress authorized $4 billion in emergency funding. That funding expired at the end of the fiscal year.
Many of those families were released while their asylum requests wind through the U.S. courts — a practice President Donald Trump has derided as "catch-and-release." Homeland Security officials have said they would detain families, but ICE has not been funded for that and Albence said it would be difficult to implement under existing law.
The emergency funds from Congress did not include additional bed space for immigration detention At one point, ICE was detaining some 56,000 people. Albence said inadequate funding has "increasingly crippled" the agency.
"We can only buy the number of beds that Congress appropriates us for," he said.
Border crossings are declining amid crackdowns by Mexico at its border plus U.S. policies that have sent more than 50,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait out their claims, and have made anyone who crossed through a third country inadmissible for asylum. Albence said ICE has recently been able to pull some resources back from the border but is still spread thin.
___
By JAKE BLEIBERG and COLLEEN LONG, reporting from Washington, D.C., Associated Press
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
Jan. 6 sentences April 19, 2024 -
