Susan Shelley: The U.S. government should be removing, not shielding, migrants with criminal records

Get ready for Operation Ruby Slippers. A lot of people are about to go home.

The last time the United States government conducted a mass deportation was 1954. It had a different name that’s not printable in a newspaper today.

If anyone had told me five years ago that a majority of the American people would ever support doing something like that again, I probably would have checked their forehead for fever and prescribed a two-week break from cable news.

But here we are. The Scripps News/Ipsos Poll conducted Sept. 13-15 (in 2024, not 1954) found that a majority of Americans support “the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.”

If you can take the word of the Department of Homeland Security, it may already have begun. “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 deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wrote in a September 25 letter to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, “The majority of all individuals encountered at the Southwest Border over the past three years have been removed, returned or expelled.”

ICE was responding to a letter Gonzales and three other members of Congress, including California’s Jay Obernolte, sent in mid-March. “ICE has reported more than 7 million cases on ERO’s [Enforcement and Removal Operations] docket as of Feb. 2024,” the lawmakers wrote. “How many of them are noncitizens who have been charged by a municipality? How many of them are noncitizens who have been convicted of a crime and released into communities? What is ERO’s current capacity for holding noncitizens in custody?”

The government’s terminology continues to evolve. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. Section 1101) uses the term “alien,” which is defined as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.” But according to DHS’s “Reporting Terminology and Definitions” as of August 2023, the term with that definition is now “noncitizen.”

ICE finally provided answers to Gonzales’ questions in September. “Your letter requests the number of noncitizens on ICE’s docket convicted or charged with a crime,” ICE Deputy Director Patrick J. Lechleitner wrote. “As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket.”

To be clear, that’s 662,566 individuals on ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations docket who are in the United States and could be removed because of their criminal history. That is, if anybody could find them, and find them in a place that was not a “sanctuary” jurisdiction refusing to cooperate with ICE.

In February, an anonymous White House spokesperson seemed to take a stand against sanctuary cities, telling Fox News Digital, “When a local jurisdiction has information about an individual who could pose a threat to public safety, we want them to share that information with ICE.”

The federal government can do more than anonymously express a desire for cooperation. For example, the Trump administration made some funding grants from the Department of Justice contingent on local cooperation with enforcement of U.S. immigration law. The Biden administration reversed that policy.

Operation Ruby Slippers would have strong public support if it sent home “noncitizens” who have been convicted of committing serious crimes. According to ICE, this includes:

– 64,579 noncitizens convicted of assault, of whom 2,348 are currently detained and 62,231 are not.

– 10,316 convicted of robbery; 285 detained and 10,031 not detained.

– 16,320 convicted of sexual assault; 509 detained and 15,811 not detained.

– 13,376 convicted of homicide; 277 detained and 13,099 not detained.

There are also 57,885 noncitizens convicted of crimes involving dangerous drugs (56,533 not detained), 14,666 convicted of burglary (14,301 not detained), 13,876 convicted of weapon offenses (13,423 not detained), and 78,164 convicted of traffic offenses (77,074 still on the streets).

In response to Rep. Gonzales’ question about the government’s capacity for holding noncitizens in custody, ICE replied that Enforcement and Removal Operations has 41,500 beds.

The word that comes to mind is “overwhelmed.”

In February 2023, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing with chief Border Patrol agents. John Modlin, Chief Patrol Agent for the Tucson Sector, testified that apprehensions at the southern border had increased sharply under the Biden-Harris administration. “In 2020, our total encounters were 66,000,” he said. “That figure nearly tripled in 2021, and then quadrupled last year [2022].”

Modlin reported that there were more than 250,000 encounters in Tucson in 2022, a 257% increase in two years. He described how cartels use a tactic called “task saturation” where smuggling operations “split large groups of migrants into many smaller groups” that all cross the border at once in different locations, “exhausting our response capabilities” and allowing unknown numbers of “gotaways” to enter the country.

The inspector general recommended that CBP and ICE “conduct a comprehensive analysis of the risks associated with releasing noncitizens without identification” into the country and that they “develop and implement policies and procedures to mitigate those risks.”

But CBP and ICE rejected those recommendations, stating that “detaining all individuals without identification would seriously risk DHS exceeding its detention capacity” of 41,500 beds.

The Department of Homeland Security was created with a mission to prevent foreign threats. It has become a doorman for them.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley