President Donald Trump’s latest order, in which he demands an end to “Catch and Release,” comes less than a month after he signed the omnibus spending bill which expanded the program, allowing for more illegal aliens caught at the border to be released into the United States.
Catch and Release is the process where illegal aliens caught by federal immigration officials are released back into the U.S. until their immigration court hearing. Part of the reason for their release into the country is because the federal government refuses to fund the space needed to detain illegal aliens until their hearing.
Trump signed the order, though it is not expected to actually end Catch and Release, rather it mandates that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report to the president in 45 to 75 days on how immigration agencies are working to bureaucratically end the practice.
The directive was signed by Trump just a few weeks after he signed a Republican and Democrat-passed spending bill that worked to expand Catch and Release, Breitbart News reported last month.
The spending bill, for instance, eliminated nearly 250 detention center beds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, making it more likely that illegal aliens will be released into the U.S. as they await their immigration hearings.
Trump signed the spending bill even though it did not include a single provision from his 70-point list of pro-American immigration reforms and did not include the 20 percent increase in ICE detention facility space that he previously requested.
At the beginning of his presidency, Trump touted his efforts to end Catch and Release in a January 2017 executive order, but the initiative to end the practice has not come to fruition.
The executive order stated:
Experts who spoke to Breitbart News have explained how the Trump administration could unilaterally end Catch and Release — thus reducing the illegal alien population — by having deployed National Guard troops build tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border as well as ordering more immigration judges and ICE attorneys to the border to fasten the court process.
As Breitbart Texas reported last year, Trump has quietly continued the Catch and Release program that occurred under the Obama administration, contributing to an increasing number of border-crossings.
In November 2017, Border Patrol warned that they did not have the detention facility space to hold border-crossers until their immigration hearings, Breitbart Texas reported.
“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,” Border Patrol Agent Brandon Judd said at the time.
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import roughly 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between seven and eight million of those foreign-born voters will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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