NumbersUSA: Bipartisan Sentencing Reform Bill Will Release Criminal Aliens

The bipartisan sentencing reform push in Congress would cause the premature release of many criminal aliens without a guarantee of deportation, according to NumbersUSA.

The immigration reduction group predicts that legislation the House and Senate is considering will disproportionately benefit criminal aliens and represents a “Trojan Horse Amnesty” for their release.

“Both the House and Senate are considering bills to ‘reform sentencing’ that would result in the massive release of criminal aliens from federal prisons into the streets,” Jim Robb, the vice president of NumbersUSA wrote in a fundraising appeal to supporters Wednesday. “There is no provision for subsequently deporting them or for putting them in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”

In a blog post, further detailing NumbersUSA’s objections to the the effort, Chris Chmielenski, the group’s director of content and activism, highlighted that the legislation would impact just the federal prison system, which holds nine percent of the U.S. prison population.

Additionally, Chmielenski wrote, a letter from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) indicated that 77 percent of people convicted on federal drug possession charges and 25 percent of people convicted on federal drug trafficking charges last fiscal year were non-citizens.

“Since these are the individuals who would most likely be released, you can see our concern with the legislation,” he wrote. “Further, there is no requirement in the legislation that Immigration and Customs Enforcement take custody of a criminal alien who is released and remove them from the United States, even when their conviction by current law should result in their immediate removal under current law.”

With the Obama administration’s relatively lax record of interior immigration enforcement, he added, the group is especially concerned that the legislation “as written, would allow tens of thousands of deportable criminal aliens to return to the American communities they victimized in the first place.”

In his fundraising email, Robb stressed that NumbersUSA is “determined to stop this bill from proceeding as written.”