Number of Illegal Aliens In Detainment Centers Up More Than 50% Under Biden

Despite then-candidate Joe Biden’s promises to decrease the detainment of illegal aliens, a new report has revealed that the number of illegal immigrants detained in Texas immigration detention facilities is up more than 50% since Biden entered office.

According to The Texas Tribune, a memo by the Biden administration to concentrate “on detaining undocumented immigrants suspected of terrorism or espionage, those who entered the country illegally after Nov. 1, 2020, and those convicted of an aggravated felony” has largely been ignored.

As a result, the paper notes that detainments are increasing, not decreasing:

On Oct. 1, a recorded 22,129 immigrants were in ICE detention centers, a 56% increase since Biden took office, according to statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, also known as TRAC. Overall, 75% of ICE detainees have no criminal record — ICE classifies a person as a convicted criminal even if the crime is as innocuous as not keeping a dog on a leash, according to TRAC’s analysis.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, the number of people in ICE detention was 38,000, according to TRAC’s analysis. Just before Biden took office in January 2021, the number of detainees decreased to as low as 15,000 — a 60% drop. That downward trend continued for the first month of the Biden administration before the number of ICE detainees started to rise.

Some who support stronger border control might see this as a good sign that Biden is detaining more illegal aliens, but overall the problem is still a crisis as more and more immigrants come to the U.S. southern border from all over the world.

In October, The Daily Wire reported that “data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) showed that the Border Patrol has made approximately 1.66 million arrests of illegal aliens entering the U.S. from Mexico for Fiscal Year 2021.”

Despite an increase in individuals migrant detention facilities, border getaways have also increased.

At the time, former acting Customs and Border Protection slammed the Biden administration for its haphazard immigration policies driven by “politics”:

“These 192,000 apprehensions are still more than 40,000 higher than the highest monthly total during the 2019 crisis, a crisis that then-President Trump quickly and successfully moved to solve,” [Mark] Morgan, [former acting CBP commissioner] said. “The Biden administration knowingly created a crisis because it sees a political benefit in mass illegal immigration, and thus it has no interest in slowing the historic surge to our border.”

“More importantly, however, official apprehensions dropped slightly while the number of got-aways—those who evade apprehension and enter the country after escaping law enforcement—increased from August,” Morgan added. “The numbers remain at unsustainable highs, and now more illegal aliens are crossing the border without even being apprehended, as more and more Border Patrol agents are pulled off the line to process migrants through overcrowded CBP facilities and release them into the United States. This cannot continue.”

It is unclear what steps the Biden administration will do to address the border, but even left-leaning outlets have placed the blame for the issue on the president and his policies.

For their part, left-leaning activists have been calling on the Biden administration to weaken his policies even more.

“President Biden has so far failed to be bold on immigration, despite promises to the contrary. Instead, his administration seems to be content in using the template left by previous administrations,” Sameera Hafiz, policy director for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center told The Texas Tribune.

“By ceding all policy decisions on enforcement to ICE … agents, the administration is on track to recreate the immigration enforcement nightmares of the Trump administration,” she added.

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