Time to stop playing criminal alien catch and release

On 60 Minutes last month, President-elect Trump promised to deport 2 to 3 million criminal aliens from the United States.

He made his priority clear: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.”

{mosads} The fact-checkers at Politifact and the Washington Post, keen to “disprove” Trump’s claim, said he’s wrong after their usual statistical and rhetorical gymnastics.

The fact-checkers do note, however, that a 2011 estimate by Immigration and Customs Enforcement puts the figure at 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens” (based on 2008 Census figures and 2003 incarceration rates).

Laughably, neither fact-checker nor Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bothered to try updating the number – based on the increased presence of immigrants subsequently convicted of crimes since the data was last produced more than a decade ago.

Moreover, Trump’s claim that criminally convicted aliens are “illegally here” is true since “removable aliens” forfeit any potential legal status they once had and are immediately eligible for deportation under federal law, regardless of how they arrived in the country.

So Trump’s claim of two to three million is likely spot-on or even an underestimation of the problem’s size.

But regardless of the figure, some millions of individuals are walking our streets with impunity who have no legal right to be here after they have violated our criminal (not civil) laws.

What’s worse is we are not even trying – due to a combination of incompetence and bureaucratic intransigence.

According to that same Department of Homeland Security report, “ICE estimates that approximately 900,000 arrests of aliens for crimes occur every year and that approximately 550,000 criminal aliens convicted of crimes exit law enforcement custody every year.”

DHS acknowledges, “This population of criminal aliens poses a major threat to public safety.”

Crucially, the report adds, “ICE has never had the capability to identify, arrest and remove all of these criminal aliens.”

In April 2016, Obama’s ICE director Sarah Saldana even acknowledged to Congress that ICE just released 86,000 criminal aliens on to the streets.

So it’s a HUGE problem but DHS is too lazy, stupid, or underfunded to actually put an end to a “major threat to public safety.”

Why can’t Trump just find the money to deport these criminals? He can and might just do it and it terrifies the softhearted do-gooders who are coddling foreign criminals.

So they will try to stop him.

And that’s just what the courts are already doing.

Just last week, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals incredulously ruled that a noncitizen from El Salvador who committed “sexual abuse of a minor” could not be deported because his crime was not “aggravated” enough of a felony. The reason was that Maryland’s law against molesting children is too strict.

It boggles the mind.

We already know that of the current federal prison population, approximately 22 percent or more than 40,000 are non-U.S. citizen offenders. 

Most states don’t even keep an accurate count of the citizenship status of their prisoners so the best estimate (from 2012) is laughably low – 100,000 of all federal and state prison (not jail) inmates (of which there were a total of 1.5 million that year) are non-citizens.

It is assuredly much higher.

Let’s stop playing catch-and-release with dangerous criminals and send them home already.

Sean Kennedy is a conservative political consultant based in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.