Republicans question Mayorkas for releasing illegal immigrants instead of detaining them

House Republicans hounded the Biden administration’s top border official, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Tuesday for allowing millions of illegal immigrants to roam the country rather than be held in federal detention facilities while they await immigration court proceedings.

GOP lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee attempted to poke holes during a hearing on Capitol Hill into Mayorkas’s statements that the Department of Homeland Security wants to detain more immigrants at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers but was stretched too thin financially to do so.

“There are thousands of beds available per day, roughly 9,000 on average in FY 2022, 3,000 a day in FY 2023,” said House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) during a DHS appropriations hearing Tuesday. “Yet the arguments before the Supreme Court and in your testimony before here to Congress had been that the resources are overwhelmed and therefore we have to just catch and release these people into the country.

“In your opening statement, you said we need more resources,” Green said to Mayorkas. “That claim for more resources so that we can adhere to the laws — you’re actually in this budget decreasing the requested ICE detention beds. That seems to me to be illogical if the reason we can’t enforce the laws as they’re written on the books is because we don’t have enough resources. There are thousands of empty beds. And we’re going to ask for less beds in this budget.”

The Biden administration has not disclosed how many of the 9 million immigrants encountered at the nation’s border since February 2021 were released into the United States, though estimates have topped 2 million.

The Immigration and Nationality Act states that federal law enforcement “shall detain” immigrants through court proceedings, but the Biden administration has exercised broad discretion in whom it chooses to detain in ICE facilities, allowing millions into the country and some placed on ankle or wrist monitoring devices.

DHS said in a statement shared with the Washington Examiner that no White House administration “has ever been able to detain every individual who crosses illegally.”

“When the relevant provisions of the INA were passed in 1996, there were fewer than 10,000 beds while apprehensions were routinely over 1 million,” DHS wrote in the email. “Congress has never provided the funding for detaining every individual who crosses illegally.”

But Republicans who met Tuesday to ask Mayorkas about the fiscal 2025 budget, which would go into effect in October, said the Biden administration’s proposal to fund 34,000 beds sorely missed the mark. Mayorkas defended how the department had approached bed space for the forthcoming year.

“Mr. Chairman, let me be very clear that we maximize the use of detention beds that are available,” Mayorkas said.

The hearing fell on the same day House Republicans transmitted two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the Senate for trial proceedings. Republicans impeached Mayorkas in February, alleging his handling of the border crisis amounted to high crimes and misdemeanors, but the Democrat-led Senate is expected to dismiss the charges.

The DHS website contains budgets going back to 2004, when the department was created. The oldest available information on the DHS site on the number of beds the White House requested funding for was in 2007, when the Bush administration requested 27,500 beds. That number rose through the years and grew to 34,000 by 2016, then 60,000 in 2021 as the Trump administration cracked down on illegal immigration.

Ahead of fiscal 2022, the Biden White House proposed cutting bed space by nearly half to 32,500 beds. The pandemic had significantly slowed illegal immigrant arrests at the southern border, but by January 2021, the number of people attempting to cross began to soar. Still, the Biden administration pushed for reduced ICE space despite its Title 42 public health authority to immediately turn away immigrants at the border.

Instead, the Biden administration began to arrest then release immigrants into the United States with few facing detention through court proceedings, years down the road.

The Biden White House proposed further reducing detention space to 25,000 beds in 2023. At that time in 2022, Border Patrol agents at the southern border were arresting roughly 200,000 illegal immigrants each month, very few of whom would be detained.

Biden’s DHS recommended bed space for 2024 remained at 25,000, as illegal migrant arrests remained at an average of more than 200,000 people arrested per month in 2023.

In 2023, roughly 36,800 illegal immigrants were detained by ICE, while more than 6.1 million were allowed to remain out of custody, according to the DHS data below.

Government data analyzed and released Tuesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University in New York, concluded that the number of illegal immigrants currently in ICE custody was at the lowest rate since the start of fiscal 2024 last October.

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TRAC determined the decline in illegal migration at the southern border in recent weeks was the leading reason fewer people were being detained, but added that ICE has increasingly relied on electronic ways to track immigrants released at the border rather than detention.

At present, 183,000 of the 6.1 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. were being tracked through ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, meaning the roughly 5.8 million remaining immigrants were either not being tracked or detained through standard means.