ICE Released Murder, Sexual Assault, Kidnapping Convicts in 2013

ICE Released Murder, Sexual Assault, Kidnapping Convicts in 2013

on Mon, 12 May 2014

A murder or assault conviction is no guarantee an immigrant will be deported or even remain in detention, an internal Department of Homeland Security document reveals. 

According to the document, obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies and shared with Breitbart News Monday, last year the Obama administration released 36,007 immigrants convicted of a nearly 88,000 crimes, including homicide and sexual assault. 

To be sure, these statistics include prior offenses, for which the convicted alien could have previously served time. 

Some of the most striking crimes, however, included 193 homicide convictions (including the murder of a public official), 426 sexual assault convictions, 9,187 dangerous drugs convictions, 1,075 aggravated assault convictions, and 228 kidnapping convictions. 

The categories with the greatest number of convictions were traffic offenses 17,228, followed by convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs with 16,070.

(See the complete list of convictions at the bottom of this article.) 

The method of release for these criminal aliens included bond, order of recognizance, order of supervision, a detention alternative, and parole.

According to a CIS report released Monday, the internal document was prepared by ICE to respond to a congressional inquiry pressing the agency on data from a March report from the CIS dealing with the 68,000 criminal aliens ICE encountered and subsequently released in 2013. 

Jessica Vaughan, the Director of Policy Studies at CIS and author of Monday's report, noted the 36,007 criminal aliens spelled out in the new internal document are a separate category from the 68,000 criminal aliens ICE encountered and released without filing immigration charges, spelled out in CIS’s earlier report. 

“These figures suggest that despite claims of a focus on public safety, the administration's prosecutorial discretion criteria are allowing factors such as family relationships, political considerations, or attention from advocacy groups to trump criminal convictions as a factor leading to deportation,” the March report read.

The 36,007 criminal aliens highlighted in this most recent document, according to Vaughan, were individuals who were being processed for deportation and released prior or after the conclusion of their deportation cases. 

In her Monday report, Vaughan noted that she has separate information showing that the majority of the releases were "discretionary" and "even contrary to the requirements of various provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act."

"Only a small share of these criminal aliens (fewer than 3,000) were released in accordance with a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Zadvydas v. Davis, which prevents ICE from indefinitely detaining certain aliens whose countries will not accept them back... Another small number may have been offered parole or legal status, either in exchange for their cooperation with ICE or another law enforcement agency in connection with a criminal prosecution, or because of another compelling public interest," she wrote.

News of these releases come following President Obama’s March directive to DHS for a review of his administration’s immigration enforcement policies, specifically deportation, seeking a manner of enforcement “more humanely within the confines of the law.”

In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 Republican senators accused Obama of trying to further weaken immigration law with the review.

“Clearly, the urgent task facing your administration is to improve immigration enforcement, not to look for new ways to weaken it,” they wrote. “Since 2009, your administration has issued policy directives and memoranda incrementally nullifying immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States — to the point that unless individuals in the country illegally are apprehended, tried, and convicted for a felony or other serious offense, they are free to live and work in the country.”

Vaughan concluded of the new document, "This information is sure to raise concerns that, despite professions of a focus on removal of criminal aliens, Obama administration policies frequently have allowed political considerations to trump public safety factors and, as a result, aliens with serious criminal convictions have been allowed to return to the streets instead of being removed to their home countries."