Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is losing track of illegal immigrants released from family detention centers and jails. ICE does not know how many immigrant families they let go and they do not seem to know where the ones they let go went.
Many of these families have been released in Texas.
New enforcement removal policies have led to criminal aliens simply being released from jails across the country, leading to ever-escalating crimes by these aliens. Many of the illegal aliens have been deported several times and returned across a non-secured border.
On Wednesday, Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz reported on the capture of a Chinese illegal immigrant crossing the Mexican border into Texas after being deported after a conviction of kidnapping.
ICE built huge family detention centers in Texas and other locations in response to last summer’s surge of unaccompanied minors and “incomplete family units” as previously reported by Breitbart Texas. Now, under a program called “alternatives to detention,” mothers with children have been let go. ICE does not seem to know where many of them are, according to a San Antonio Express-News report.
Prior to this spring, ICE was only tracking cases of these incomplete family units who bothered to show up at ICE offices around the country to register. In May of 2015, ICE began releasing families at the border and tracking them.
Texas sheriffs met in Austin on Wednesday, as reported by Breitbart Texas’ Lana Shadwick, to discuss problems they face with ICE’s new Priority Enforcement Program. Criminal illegal aliens are no longer being held for deportation in many cases.
Sheriffs must deal with the problems created by this program that ties their hands. Jackson County Sheriff A.J. Louderback told Shadwick that criminal aliens know that law enforcement officials in Texas have their hands tied because of these new federal policies. They know they can come into the country illegally and stay here with impunity.
Louderback said, “These criminals bond out and disappear into the country.”
Lawyers for the immigrant families being released said “language barriers, bureaucracy and lack of access to attorneys create hurdles for immigrant families,” according to the Express-News report.
Bob Price is a senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas and a member of the original Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.