For skeptics who don’t believe that President Joe Biden and the liberals’ progressive open-borders policy is a danger to our society, several reports prove them wrong. A record number of noncitizen criminals were apprehended in fiscal 2023.
“In fiscal 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers apprehended nearly 50,000 criminal noncitizens; Customs and Immigration Enforcement and Removal Operation (ERO) agents made 170,590 administrative arrests; and Homeland Security Investigations agents made over 33,000 criminal arrests nationwide” reports The Center Square.
The Center Square continues in its report:
According to CBP data, Office of Field Operations agents at ports of entry arrested 20,166 noncitizens with criminal convictions or those who were wanted by law enforcement in fiscal 2023 nationwide. They also arrested 11,509 individuals who already committed crimes and were in the National Crime Information Center database. The NCIC database tracks crime-related information and is available to federal, state and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies.
“Criminal noncitizens,” CBP explains, refers to non-U.S. citizens “who have been convicted of crime, whether in the United States or abroad, so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States. Criminal noncitizens encountered at ports of entry are inadmissible, absent extenuating circumstances, and represent a subset of total OFO inadmissibles.”
Inadmissibles are required under federal law to be processed for deportation. In September 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas implemented a new deportation policy stating that illegal entry itself was no longer a deportable offense despite federal law stating it is, The Center Square reported. Texas and Louisiana sued only to be told by the U.S. Supreme Court they didn’t have standing to sue.
In ICE’s fiscal 2023 annual report, it claims ICE ERO agents “nearly doubled immigration enforcement arrests and increased removals for those with no legal basis to remain in the country from the totals cited in last year’s report.”
The record high arrests of criminal noncitizens occurred as nearly 4 million foreign nationals illegally entered the U.S. in fiscal 2023, the highest number in U.S. history and greater than the populations of 22 individual states, The Center Square exclusively reported.
The trend continued in 2024. In the first quarter of fiscal 2024, apprehensions at the southwest and northernborders were the highest in U.S. history, The Center Square also reported.