On the menu today: In one of the most jaw-dropping Friday-afternoon news dumps of all time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that the agency’s docket included more than 662,000 illegal immigrants who either had a criminal conviction or were awaiting a verdict in a criminal case, including more than 13,000 convicted murderers, more than 15,000 convicted of sexual assault, more than 2,500 convicted of kidnapping, and more than 62,000 convicted of assault. (Note that it’s been more than a decade since the Senate confirmed a new ICE director.) Also: a list of trustworthy organizations that are helping out victims of Hurricane Helene, and an overlooked chat about fiction and nonfiction writing.
As of July, 662,566 Illegal Immigrants on ICE’s Docket Have a Criminal History
Back in mid March, GOP representative Tony Gonzales, who represents a district covering much of the southwestern border of Texas, asked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “information on illegal immigrants on ICE’s docket to better understand how many potential criminals were being released into our communities.”
It took nearly six months, but ICE deputy director Patrick Lechleitner responded to the congressman’s request with perhaps the mother of all Friday-afternoon news dumps: As of July 2024, 662,566 illegal immigrants on ICE’s docket have a criminal history. Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 illegal immigrants face pending criminal charges.
Among those not in ICE detention, there are 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 with pending criminal charges.
These are, in many cases, violent criminals. Some 62,231 were convicted of assault, 14,301 were convicted of burglary, and 13,099 were convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual-assault convictions.
There are an additional 1,845 with pending homicide charges, 42,915 with assault charges, 3,266 with burglary charges, and 4,250 with assault charges. ICE records showed 792 illegal immigrants on their docket convicted of arson, 2,200 convicted of “commercialized sex offenses,” 9,461 convicted of sex offenses not involving assault or commercialized sex, and 13,413 convicted of “weapon charges.”
Sleep tight, America!
It is worth noting that these lists include convictions both here in the U.S. and abroad, and some of the individuals are already in prison. If an illegal immigrant is in a U.S. prison after being convicted of a crime unrelated to his immigration status, he may still be listed as “non-detained” on the ICE docket.
Two law-enforcement officials told NBC News that “it is not known how many are incarcerated because ICE is not always privy to that data from state and local law enforcement agencies.”
That seems like the sort of information that would be good to share, no?
In Brunswick, Ga., “an illegal alien who participated [in] a multi-million-dollar scheme to fraudulently employ undocumented workers, then murdered a whistleblower who attempted to expose the scheme, has been sentenced to life in prison.”
In Harford County, Conn., a 19-year-old illegal immigrant from El Salvador was “incarcerated at the Harford County Detention Center where he admitted to committing four murders, two rapes, and additional other crimes, which was also provided to the court in support of the plea” of first-degree murder, for the crime of strangling a 20-year-old woman.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico “pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree murder, one count of carjacking, one count of carrying a concealed weapon and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony for the March 22 murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia.”
In Houston, “two undocumented Venezuelan men were charged with capital murder in the killing of a 12-year-old girl. . . . Both men are Venezuelan nationals who entered the US illegally, a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement told CNN. It’s unclear when and where they entered the country, the spokesperson said, but each was apprehended near El Paso by US Border Patrol — Martinez-Rangel on March 14 and Peña Ramos on May 28 — and released with a notice to appear in court in the future.”
Are these examples of convicted or charged murderers who are on the ICE list but not walking the street?
How is it, 23 years after 9/11, that the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and state and local law-enforcement agencies can’t coordinate and integrate this data?
Note that some of these criminals are still in the U.S. because their countries of origin won’t take them back.
John Sandweg, the acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, described a hypothetical to CNN:
“Let’s say you have a Russian who was convicted of homicide. There’s nothing we can do there,” Sandweg said, given how Russia simply won’t accept the deportation. “There comes a point where you just have to release them.” He added that this doesn’t mean the person is “completely free” — people on the non-detained docket often have to check in with ICE or be monitored electronically — “but there’s just no more legal authority to continue the detention.”
The notion of convicted murderers walking around American streets with ankle-bracelet monitors or having regular check-ins with ICE isn’t particularly reassuring.
According to ICE, there is one illegal immigrant convicted of, and one illegal immigrant facing charges on, “antitrust,” which is “the concentration of economic power, particularly in regard to monopolies and other anticompetitive practices.” As if the situation weren’t bad enough, these white-collar criminals from overseas are coming over here and taking away jobs from American white-collar criminals.
An unidentified Department of Homeland Security spokesman told Fox News that the data were being misinterpreted:
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration,” a spokesperson said. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
If Mr. DHS Spokesman thinks the data aren’t clear enough, he should take it up with ICE and Deputy Director Lechleitner. (Note that Lechleitner is also the “senior official performing the duties of the director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed director since Sarah Saldaña was confirmed in 2014; the agency has had ten acting directors since then. Multiple presidents have said they take immigration enforcement seriously, but apparently that doesn’t include finding and nominating a director who can get confirmed.)
Note that Lechleitner’s letter to Gonzales revealing the shocking stats also includes a shot at “sanctuary cities” and counties:
ICE recognizes that some jurisdictions are concerned that cooperating with federal immigration officials will erode trust with immigrant communities and make it harder for local law enforcement to serve those populations. However, “sanctuary” policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities.”
Keep in mind that, besides cities and counties that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration-enforcement authorities, eleven states are, to varying degrees, sanctuary states.
Two states had particularly strong and comprehensive laws protecting immigrants, and fell into the most protective category: Oregon and Illinois. Three other states also have broad sanctuary statutes: New Jersey, California, and Washington. Colorado, Maryland, Vermont, and Connecticut have also enacted laws against their involvement in immigration enforcement. New York and Rhode Island have taken some small steps toward reducing immigration enforcement.
Lechleitner took over on July 4, 2023; his letter notes that, “from mid-May 2023 through the end of July 2024, DHS removed or returned more than 893,600 individuals, including more than 138,300 individuals in family units. The majority of all individuals encountered at the Southwest Border over the past three years have been removed, returned, or expelled.”
It seems likely that, at minimum, Lechleitner — whose résumé includes stints in the U.S. Navy, the Fairfax County, Va., police, and Homeland Security Investigations — takes his organization’s duties seriously. The unnamed DHS spokesman, on the other hand, issued a statement that amounted to, “whatever you do, don’t blame the Biden administration or Kamala Harris.”
But there’s no getting around it — under the Biden administration, removals plummeted:
In [fiscal year] 2019, removals exceeded 267,000. In FY2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE removed 185,884 illegal aliens. In FY2021, the number was just 59,011, 72,177 in FY2022, and 142,580 in FY2023 — still more than 40,000 fewer than the lowest number during the Trump administration.
As House Republicans on the Homeland Security committee concluded:
Meanwhile, the number of individuals on the [non-detained docket] who have not been ordered removed by an immigration judge increased from 3.5 million in FY22 to 4.9 million in FY23, while those with a final order of removal only increased around 76,000. In other words, the Biden-Harris administration is releasing illegal aliens into the interior at a far greater rate than they are being ordered removed—let alone actually removed. [Emphasis added.]
John Fabbricatore is the former director of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement’s Denver field office; he retired from ICE on July 31, 2022. In October 2023, he said on Twitter, “one of the reasons I retired early was because I was being forced to release people that should not have been allowed on the street. They continue to release people from custody like it’s a revolving door. All on the orders of Sec. Mayorkas and the Biden Administration.”
Fabbricatore is now running for Congress in Colorado against Jason Crow, a three-term incumbent Democrat, in a D+9 district that encompasses the eastern part of the Denver suburbs, including Aurora. (You’ll want to read Tracy Wolfer Osborne’s investigative report on how “two publicly funded Denver nonprofits — ViVe Wellness and Organization Papagayo — chose to move thousands of Venezuelan migrants, including some members of the violent Tren de Aragua street gang, into run-down apartment complexes in nearby Aurora precisely because those buildings were poorly managed.”)
The hardest-working reporter on the immigration and border beat, Fox News’ Bill Melugin, concludes:
Not all of these criminals entered during the Biden administration, as some are claiming. The data doesn’t show when the more than 425,000+ convicted criminal noncitizens on the non-detained docket entered — but as of August 2016, the DHS OIG shows just over 368,000 convicted criminals were already on the non-detained docket. Some of these criminals go back many years across multiple administrations. However, the non-detained docket has more than doubled under the Biden admin, from 3.2 million at the end of FY2020 to over 7.3 million now.
The bottom line — the data shows there are tens of thousands of illegal aliens convicted of homicide, rapes, and other violent felonies currently roaming in the US — and until we get a clearer breakdown of data, it’s not possible to tell when they all specifically entered.
Ways to Help Victims of Hurricane Helene
As of this writing, Hurricane Helene has killed 87 people in six states, and flooding has devastated much of western North Carolina as well as parts of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
On Sunday, the great Emily Zanotti gathered links to on-the-ground organizations helping victims of the hurricane. Some of the organizations on Emily’s list are providing generators, distributing fresh water and food, and making air drops. They are looking for volunteers to help with distribution and more.
Just to assuage any doubts, I went through and checked them on Charity Navigator. A few weren’t listed, but the majority were extremely highly rated. Her list includes:
The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky (rated 87 percent on Charity Navigator), Water Mission (rated 100 percent), Appalachia Service Project (rated 98 percent), Samaritan’s Purse (rated 100 percent), Catholic Charities (rated 100 percent), Catholic Charities of East Tennessee (95 percent), East Tennessee Foundation (97 percent), United Cajun Navy (73 percent), God’s Pit Crew (100 percent), Convoy of Hope (100 percent), and Matthew 25 Ministries (100 percent).
No doubt, all these organizations can use whatever help you can spare.
ADDENDUM: Somehow at the time I forgot to tout and share this interview with the insightful and sharp Christian Toto, who runs @HollywoodInToto. He’s a strong contender for most consistently intriguing right-of-center critic and analyst of culture high and low. My chat with Christian was the best and most in-depth chat I’ve done about my novels and both fiction and nonfiction writing.