U.S Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Justice are introducing measures to accelerate the deportation of imprisoned illegal aliens with the announcement of a new immigration program on Thursday.
The Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), will seek to reduce the bureaucratic processes involved in deportation by using video-conference hearings to determine the fate of illegals once they have served their sentence.
The program includes giving more Bureau of Prisons contract facilities the power to undertake deportation proceedings, installing the required technology, and introducing new uniform intake policy between a DOJ office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We owe it to the American people to ensure that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in our federal prisons are expeditiously removed from our country as the law requires,” Sessions said in a statement announcing the plan.
“This expansion and modernization of the Institutional Hearing Program gives us the tools to continue making Americans safe again in their communities,” he continued.
Earlier this week, Sessions said that cities refusing to comply with federal immigration law, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, risked losing federal tax dollars.
“I strongly urge our nation’s states and cities and counties to consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce immigration laws and to rethink these policies. Such policies make their cities and states less safe. Public safety as well as national security are at stake and put them at risk of losing federal dollars,” Sessions said at a White House press briefing.
The warning comes amidst a nationwide crackdown enforcing immigration policy as part of Donald Trump’s wider immigration reforms. As well as plans to hire 15,000 new Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents, the Department of Justice is now publishing a weekly list all 118 localities refusing to cooperate with the administration’s immigration policy, as well as crimes committed by illegal immigrants within them.
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