After falling in the early months of the Trump administration, illegal immigration is surging once again. ICE has run out of detention space and is having to tell Border Patrol officers to take captured illegals back to the Mexican border and release them, rather than hold them for formal deportation.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said Wednesday: “The moment we start releasing them out our front door, you’re going to see a huge increase take place in the numbers coming across.” Mr. Judd said the tough enforcement rhetoric from the president is good and had an immediate impact earlier this year in persuading aliens not to make the journey north. Arrests at the border surged to 26,000 last month he said.
Tyler Houlton, acting press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, suggested the problem was in the courts: “We enforce the law but are severely constrained by litigation, court rulings and debilitating legal loopholes that limit our ability to carry out our mission.”
The other reason for the increase in illegal entries is Obama-appointed officials still in high positions at DHS. Chris Crane, the president of the National ICE Council, in a letter to President Trump this week, warned that the president’s top officers were preventing him from hearing what is really going on. “While officers view the President’s position on enforcement as courageous, the Trump administration has left all of the Obama managers and leadership in place, a group that ICE Officers know after the last eight years to be completely incompetent, corrupt and anti-enforcement,” Crane wrote.