Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that he is ordering the closure of two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities that hold criminal illegal aliens.
On Thursday, Mayorkas said he is directing ICE to end its use of the C. Carlos Carreiro Immigration Detention Center in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, requesting agents transfer criminal illegal aliens out of the facilities.
As part of the closing of both ICE facilities, Mayorkas is directing ICE to terminate its Intergovernmental Services Agreement and its 287(g) agreement with the Bristol County, Massachusetts Sheriff’s Office — both programs which help streamline the process of local police cooperating with the agency to arrest and deport illegal aliens.
“Allow me to state one foundational principle: we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention,” Mayorkas wrote to ICE Acting Director Tae Johnson in a memo.
“DHS detention facilities and the treatment of individuals in those facilities will be held to our health and safety standards,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “Where we discover they fall short, we will continue to take action as we are doing today.”
Mayorkas said in a news release that he will “continue to review concerns with other federal immigration detention centers,” suggesting more ICE facility closures may be forthcoming.
The move is only the latest by President Joe Biden’s administration to dismantle interior immigration enforcement.
Immediately after taking office, Biden reimplemented an Obama-era plan that will phase out the Bureau of Prisons’ 11 privately operated facilities, nearly all of which hold foreign nationals convicted of federal crimes.
Likewise, a series of “sanctuary country” orders issued by Biden’s top DHS officials have drastically cut the number of criminal illegal aliens in ICE detention facilities as agents are unable to arrest and deport most illegal aliens.
Currently, Democrat lawmakers are lobbying the Biden administration to fully end ICE’s 287(g) program that allows local law enforcement agencies to seamlessly identify criminal illegal aliens and turn them over to ICE agents for arrest and deportation.
A recent investigation by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) revealed that ending 287(g) agreements coincided with counties seeing violent crime increase.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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