How we can deport criminal illegal aliens from the United States

There are over 660,000 illegal immigrants in the United States today who have criminal charges pending for crimes other than just crossing the border illegally. By all law and logic they should be behind bars. Instead, they are allowed to move freely throughout the country, placing the entire risk of their future wrongdoing on American communities rather than their own countries. Of those 660,000, about two-thirds – 435,000 – are previously convicted criminals, including 13,000 convicted murderers.

Most of these foreigners are among the approximately 1.3 million who have been deported by immigration court. They had already had their due process and, after a separate immigration procedure to determine whether they could remain in the United States, they received what is known as a “final order of removal” from an immigration judge. Legally we can and morally we should send them home immediately.

Why are these people – many of whom will surely relapse – still here? One reason is that the Biden-Harris administration has been intentionally lax in enforcing our immigration laws domestically. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said early in President Joe Biden’s term that an alien who is here illegally is not reason enough for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to try to deport him (although that is certainly the case). is). Mayorkas sent an infamous memo to ICE in 2021 ordering this crackdown and placing burdensome paperwork and restrictions on officers on where and how they could take action.

That’s one of the reasons why all the criminal aliens are still here, but that’s not all. Another reason is that some countries refuse to take back their populations. The United States and other responsible countries repatriate their citizens from anywhere in the world, no matter how serious their crimes. But countries like China, India and Venezuela are saying, ‘No, we’re not going to take our people back.’ They’re your problem now.”

These countries play various tricks to shift their problems onto us. Let’s say a Chinese illegal immigrant is caught in an armed robbery, convicted, and serves a ten-year prison sentence. In the end, the prison informs ICE, who picks up the convict and places him in immigration detention. If the alien has a final deportation order, ICE still has to bring him home. If he does not have a passport or confirmation of citizenship, ICE requires a consular officer from the alien’s home country to verify the ex-inmate’s citizenship.

Countries can outright refuse aid or deny that a foreigner is one of their own. Or they claim they don’t have the staff to handle the processing and then delay so long that ICE has to release the alien in the United States. According to a number of court decisions over the years, ICE can only detain an alien if there is a reasonable chance of deporting him or her, and even then only for a limited period of time.

ICE describes countries that refuse or delay taking back their people as “recalcitrant.” In 2016 there was a list of about a dozen such countries and a longer list of those at risk of non-compliance. ICE would work diplomatically with the State Department to persuade recalcitrant countries to repatriate their people. From 2016 to 2017, I was the Foreign Ministry’s coordinator in this regard.

One tool we had at our disposal was visa sanctions. According to U.S. law, if a country “refuses or unreasonably delays the admission of an alien who is a citizen,” the U.S. State Department can stop issuing visas for its citizens to enter the U.S. This can range from not allowing the families of their heads of state to go to Disney World to completely banning visas from this country. It’s amazingly effective.

Using visa sanctions, the US has made significant progress in persuading recalcitrant countries to change their minds. The first country we worked in was the small African nation of Gambia. It wasn’t chosen because of its size or location, but because it only had 11 convicted criminal aliens, it didn’t want to take it back. Initially, the United States informed Gambia that our embassy would no longer issue visas to Gambian officials and their families due to their refusal to cooperate.

The message was clear: if this didn’t work, we would move on to ever larger groups of Gambians. A few weeks later, the Gambian government approved and accepted the repatriation of the eleven Gambian nationals subject to final deportation from the United States and requested the lifting of visa sanctions.

From Gambia, the US moved up the list of recalcitrants, taking on Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone, as well as much tougher screwballs like Cambodia. By the end of the Trump administration, the US had even taken action against the really big offenders – China, India and Russia – to take back their criminals. At that time, China and India each had about 20,000 convicted criminals living illegally in the United States.

For a while there was a will and a way, and it worked. So what happened?

From the outset, the Biden administration immediately made illegal entry and stay in the United States easier by reversing all measures that previous presidents used to control illegal entry at the border. The consequence of the government’s open borders approach has been to significantly limit domestic enforcement – and no longer put pressure on foreign countries to take back their populations.

The last list of recalcitrant countries published by ICE dates back to 2020. The agency’s visa sanctions website hasn’t really changed in four years. Because of this lack of updated information, members of Congress wrote to Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July asking which countries the Department of Homeland Security deemed recalcitrant.

Mayorkas has not yet responded. However, sources tell me that China, Cuba, India and Pakistan are still on the list. India is so desperate for US visas that simply suspending the issuance of H1B work visas would make them feel better – but has the Biden team threatened them with sanctions? Great opportunity.

When the Biden-Harris administration exerts diplomatic pressure on recalcitrant countries, it is well hidden. More likely, the administration has given up on the effort, given the low number of deportations each year and the fact that DHS admits millions of unvetted aliens from around the world, including from many recalcitrant countries.

The Biden-Harris administration would have us believe that there is nothing it can do to prevent illegal aliens, including violent members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, from entering the United States. When these thugs then murder, rape and rob Americans, they want us to believe that there is nothing they can do to send them home.

Don’t believe it. Visa sanctions are one tool, but there are many others and we should use them. America should use all possible diplomatic, economic and legal pressure to force countries like Venezuela, China and others to do their duty and take back their criminals.

Removing dangerous criminals who are in our country illegally is the government’s fundamental duty to its citizens. Violent crime rates have already risen across America in recent years, newly revised FBI data shows. The White House should stop making excuses and immediately reinstate visa sanctions, as this is a simple and effective solution to reducing the number of foreign convicts and restoring some level of law and order in this country.

The borderline is a weekly Daily Signal feature that examines all things unforeseen illegal immigration crisis at the border to the impact of immigration on cities and states across the country. We will also highlight other critical border issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism and more.

Read other BorderLine columns:

Biden administration gives Panama “Jack” to help with border control

What I saw during my visit to Springfield, Ohio

“The BorderLine” anniversary column: One year later, another look at Biden’s border in numbers

Blaming Harris Trump for the murder in the bipartisan border bill would codify the illegal immigration crisis into law

The Staggering Costs of Biden-Harris’ “America Burden” Border Policies – Part 2