President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has stopped fining illegal aliens who refused to depart the United States, the agency revealed.
In an announcement on Friday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated that the agency has stopped issuing fines to illegal aliens who refused to depart the U.S. despite previously stating that they would depart.
Former President Trump, with the authority of the Immigration and Nationality Act, finally started requiring the federal government in 2018 to issue fines to illegal aliens who refused to depart the U.S. after the provision failed to be enforced for more than 20 years.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, the Trump administration started fining illegal aliens up to $500 every day they refused to depart the U.S. In some cases, illegal aliens racked up fines of close to $500,000 for violating federal immigration law.
Mayorkas, in a statement, said DHS has rescinded the use of fines on illegal aliens, claiming the authorized policy is not effective in deterring illegal immigration. DHS stopped issuing the fines on January 20 but had not announced the policy change until Friday.
“There is no indication that these penalties promoted compliance with noncitizens’ departure obligations,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “We can enforce our immigration laws without resorting to ineffective and unnecessary punitive measures.”
In addition, illegal aliens fined by the Trump administration will have their debt cancelled by the Treasury Department, a news release states:
After reviewing detailed data regarding the issuance of such fines since 2018, it was clear to Secretary Mayorkas and Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Tae Johnson that the fines were not effective and had not meaningfully advanced the interests of the agency. ICE intends to work with the Department of Treasury to cancel the existing debts of those who had been fined. [Emphasis added]
The move is only the latest that the Biden administration has undertaken to gut interior immigration enforcement.
Under current enforcement guidelines, DHS is preventing about 9-in-10 deportations with “sanctuary country” orders that have resulted in a 70 percent drop in the number of criminal illegal aliens in federal custody and an 80 percent reduction in arrests of illegal aliens.
Analysis conducted this month predicts that 1.2 million border crossers will be apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border this year, not including those illegal aliens who successfully crossed into the country. This would be a level of illegal immigration not seen since the Great Recession.
Today, there are anywhere between 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S., costing American taxpayers about $134 billion every year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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