The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reported that nearly one million immigrants are ignoring a deportation order from an immigration court. Nearly 200,000 of those are convicted criminals.
“The fact that almost 10 percent of the illegal resident population has already been ordered removed and is still here illustrates just how dysfunctional our immigration enforcement system is. It also should be of great concern that 20 percent of them are convicted criminals, and that most of these are at large in our communities,” CIS Policy Studies Director Jessica Vaughn told the Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan.
Her comments were based on a report released by the CIS on June 30. The report reveals that 925,193 immigrants have remained in the United States after being ordered to leave the country. Of those, 179,040 are convict[ed] criminals who were ordered deported. Only 11,373 of those ordered deported have been detained.
Of the 179,040 convicted criminals who were ordered removed, only 6,905 are being detained. That leaves 172,135 convicted criminal aliens roaming the streets after a final order of removal. This number is at the highest lever for the past four report years and represents a 20 percent increase over the 2012 numbers, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports obtained by CIS.
Vaughn reported the three main reasons why the aliens ordered deported are still in this country.
The first reason is the home country of the alien’s refusal to accept their return. Vaughn reported that twenty-three countries currently are uncooperative” with ICE efforts to repatriate the individual with their home country. Sixty-two others are listed as “strained.”
Unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigrants ordered deported can not be held for more than 180 days except in certain situations. ICE was forced to release 2,166 aliens from custody in 2015 and a total of more than 6,100 during the previous two years.
The second reason for the aliens remaining illegally in the country after being ordered deported is they simply disappear. “Former immigration judge Mark Metcalf has analyzed immigration court data and found that more than half of non-detained aliens skip out on their hearings, Vaughn wrote in the report.
The third reason listed is sanctuary policies of many cities located across the country. Vaughn reported that dozens of state and local governments have adopted sanctuary policies that obstruct ICE from being able to take deportable aliens into custody.
Most notable among these is Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez. This criminal illegal alien was awaiting his sixth deportation after serving time in a federal prison in California. Before he could be deported, San Francisco asked to take custody of the criminal alien on an old drug charge. When that charge was dropped, the sanctuary city of San Francisco ignored the immigration hold order and released him on the public. A few months later, he allegedly shot and killed Kate Steinle in cold blood as she was walking along the San Francisco Pier with her father. Breitbart News has reported extensively on Steinle’s murder and the controversy over the city’s sanctuary policy.
Mexico leads the list of both the number of aliens ordered deported and criminal non-deported aliens. 187,384 of the non-deported aliens are from our neighbor to the south while 67,792 of the criminal aliens not deported also come from that country. Cubans represent the second largest number of non-deported criminal aliens.
A full sixty percent of the nearly one million aliens roaming the country after being ordered deported come from Mexico and the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Bob Price serves as senior political news contributor and is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.
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