The federal government shares responsibility when any illegal alien commits murder — it failed to keep him out in the first place. And when a sanctuary city releases a deportable criminal, Washington shares the blame for any subsequent crimes because it’s not cracking down on such rogue jurisdictions nullifying federal law.
But federal responsibility is greatest when ICE actually has the criminal aliens in its custody, and then releases them to go and kill some more. Needless to say, the Obama administration doesn’t advertise when that happens.
But the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded the information from ICE, which my colleague Jessica Vaughan has summarized. The most outrageous find: Since 2010, 124 criminal aliens who were in ICEs custody and then released went on to be charged with 135 new homicides.
The Judiciary Committee also asked about criminal aliens released by ICE more than once. Since 2013, there have been 156 such criminal aliens, who racked up between them a total of 243 additional convictions after being let go.
None of these statistics include criminal aliens released by sanctuary cities or those whom ICE simply refused to pick up from local jails in the first place. These are only those who were in ICE’s hands, and then let go.
Many of these non-citizen criminals were released with ICE’s affirmative consent. A significant number were ordered released by the Justice Department, pursuant to a Supreme Court decision, because their home countries wouldn’t take them back. But even here, the administration is culpable. The Secretary of State is required by law to suspend the issuance of visas in any country that won’t take back its own citizens. The Obama administration has never — not once — complied with this legal requirement.
Here’s the list of countries ICE has identified as refusing to take back their deportable citizens:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Burundi, Cape Verde, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, India, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
Afghanistan and Iraq? We let our colonies refuse to accept their deportable citizens, so they can stay here and commit more crimes? Who, then, is the colonizer and who the colonized? And how about Cuba? The administration has made clear that the issue of deportees wasn’t — and still isn’t — even on the table in discussion of normalizing relations. And the idea that pipsqueak countries like Gambia or Cape Verde can freely defy us suggests that “superpower” doesn’t mean what people think.
Politicians have no business even suggesting things like amnesty or increased immigration and guestworkers until outrages like this are banished.