Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been told not to arrest and deport certain illegal alien sex offenders, Senate Republicans said this week in congressional testimony.

During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and James Lankford (R-OK) detailed two cases where ICE agents said they were told by top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials not to arrest and deport convicted illegal alien sex offenders.

“‘It’s absolutely not true that ICE officers have been told not to arrest people,’ that’s what you said earlier today. That astounds me … ICE officers have asked me to ask you about the instructions your guidance has given them not to arrest individuals,” Hawley said:

For instance, the National ICE Council, that’s the ICE union, has asked me to ask you — because they can’t get answers from you so they’re asking me to do it — why ICE officers who have requested permission to go after an illegal alien who is convicted of sexual assault of a minor under 14 years of age were denied the ability to go and arrest this person. [Emphasis added]

Sen. Lankford raised another case where ICE officers were directed not to pursue a previously deported alien who was convicted of indecency with a child by sexual contact and confined for five years. This is a registered sex offender and ICE officers were told not to remove this criminal alien. [Emphasis added]

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he could not “speak to cases without looking at the files and speaking to them with knowledge of the evidence and the facts.”

This week, ICE announced a multi-state raid where more than 300 illegal alien sex offenders were arrested as part of the agency’s Operation SOAR.

Despite the raid, President Joe Biden’s administration continues to implement “sanctuary country” orders where illegal aliens cannot be arrested or deported if they are not a recently convicted aggravated felon, a known terrorist, or gang member.

For months, reports have circulated that the sanctuary country orders are freeing illegal alien sex offenders, domestic abusers, burglarers, thieves, stalkers, and drug traffickers among others. Analysis from January estimates that the orders are preventing about 9-in-10 deportations.

“Forget sanctuary cities — this administration is rapidly turning the U.S. into a sanctuary country,” former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and FAIR, said in May.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.