ICE's Crane Slams Rubio for Claiming Bill Ends 'De Facto Amnesty'

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) National Council president Chris Crane on Wednesday debunked the claim from “Gang of Eight” member Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that the 1,200-page senate immigration bill would end what Rubio calls “de facto amnesty.” 

In a letter sent to Rubio obtained by Breitbart News, Crane said that “one of the main points made by you publicly is that the Gang of Eight legislation will stop what you refer to as ‘de facto amnesty.'”

“Millions of dollars have been spent on television advertisements which feature you and call on Americans to support your bill to end the nation’s practice of de facto amnesty,” Crane, an ICE agent himself and former marine, wrote to Rubio. “Yet your bill does nothing to end de facto amnesty, and only guarantees it will continue.”

Crane wrote that de facto amnesty is the idea that there “is a failure to enforce the nation’s immigration laws on the interior of the United States.” 

Crane noted that 40 percent of illegal aliens in the United States “did not illegally cross the border, but instead entered illegally with a visa and didn’t leave when it expired.” Crane said that the 40,000 extra Border Patrol agents the new Corker-Hoeven version of the bill provides “will never come in contact with these individuals, as they never attempted illegal entry into the United States.”

“While visa overstays represent nearly half of the overall immigration problem facing our broken immigration system, your legislation does nothing to increase enforcement of these violations,” Crane wrote. “Due to these failures in your legislation, de facto amnesty will continue for millions of future visa overstays illegally residing in the United States.”

Crane said that there are currently only 5,000 ICE officers across 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam. “That’s a force half the size of some police departments covering an area larger than the continental United States,” Crane wrote. “The number of additional ICE immigration officers provided by your legislation to perform interior enforcement and stop de facto amnesty – zero.” 

Crane pointed out that systems like E-Verify and entry-exit visa tracking systems may help “identify millions of illegal immigrants and status violators, but ICE officers will not exist to locate and apprehend them rendering the systems useless.”

“The majority of foreign nationals identified by these systems will remain in the United States under the de facto amnesty provided by your legislation,” Crane wrote.

Crane added that there are 500,000 ICE fugitives “currently at large in the United States.”

“ICE estimates 2 million criminal aliens at large in the United States,” he continued. “900,000 criminal aliens are arrested by local police each year. The majority of fugitives and criminal aliens now remain in the U.S. under de facto amnesty; your legislation will do nothing to assist ICE officers in stopping it.”

Crane went on to compare political appointees at the ICE, INS, and DHS “abusing their discretionary authorities” to the scandals at the IRS, the State Department, and the Justice Department.

“Instead of reducing the discretionary authority of political appointees ICE and DHS to end these abuses and stop de facto amnesty, your legislation increases their discretion thereby guaranteeing it will continue,” Crane wrote.