The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is suing President Joe Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for withholding internal agency information regarding its policy to hide the identities of criminal illegal aliens that agents arrest.
On Thursday, IRLI’s Dale Wilcox announced that the watchdog group is suing ICE after the agency failed to reply to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
That request asked ICE to hand over internal information and emails on how the agency decides when to reveal a criminal illegal alien’s identity in press releases.
IRLI conducted an investigation last year which found that under former President Donald Trump, ICE named 97 percent of criminal illegal aliens identified in press releases while under Biden, only 67 percent of criminal illegal aliens are being named in press releases.
“ICE’s sudden decision to omit the names of alien offenders from press releases appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep the public from determining whether dangerous foreign criminals have been removed from the United States,” IRLI’s Director of Investigations Matt O’Brien said in a statement. “That’s rather hypocritical coming from an administration that claims to be the most transparent in the history of the U.S.”
Most recently, for example, ICE issued a press release that detailed the arrest of an unidentified 27-year-old illegal alien from Ecuador who has been convicted of second-degree assault and indecent assault of a child in Danbury, Connecticut.
In another, ICE detailed the case of a 32-year-old Dominican illegal alien who was convicted in Waterbury, Connecticut of trafficking cocaine. Despite the conviction, the illegal alien’s identity was not revealed.
Even in the most egregious criminal cases, ICE refuses to name illegal alien suspects. For instance, a 20-year-old Brazilian national was arrested by the agency this month after he was charged with raping a child in Milford, Massachusetts. The man’s name was not provided.
“This is yet another shameless attempt by the current administration to hide the disastrous impact of its immigration policies,” Wilcox said:
Not including the names of criminal immigration violators is effectively flushing their cases down the memory hole so that watchdog groups will have a more difficult time holding this White House accountable for their destructive actions. The American people deserve transparency on this matter. [Emphasis added]
The case is Immigration Reform Law Institute v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, No. 24-cv-1101 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.