To get around President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) lax enforcement of federal immigration law, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has issued a plan that would authorize states to deport illegal aliens and help build barriers along the United States-Mexico border.
On Wednesday, Hawley announced the “State Border Defense Act” which would, among other things, allow individual states to deport illegal aliens that local law enforcement encounters.
“Our southern border is overrun. Joe Biden’s dangerous open-border policies are making it worse every single day, leaving states like Missouri to deal with the consequences,” Hawley said in a statement.
In addition, the legislation would authorize states to fund the construction of physical barriers along the southern border. States would also be allowed to prosecute illegal aliens for crimes they commit by crossing the border.
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“Since the federal government refuses to enforce our immigration laws, states must be able to,” Hawley said.
Allowing states to deport illegal aliens would be a game-changer in terms of turning around the Biden administration’s historically low annual total of deportations.
In the first nine months of the Biden administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deported only 16,351 illegal aliens arrested by local police departments — a 70 percent drop compared to 2019.
Meanwhile, very few of the tens of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior every month by the Biden administration are being put into deportation proceedings.
Among a subset of those released from the border into the U.S. by the Biden administration, fewer than 20 percent have been given a Notice to Appear (NTA) before a federal immigration judge.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.